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st3 hot_exit with session backup.md

ST3 hot_exit but keep old sessions

Sublimes hot_exit feature is awesome: Don't prompt me, remember the state of my open and unsaved files.... whatever. However, if most of the time you launch sublime with subl directory/i/want/to/open I get two windows: one for your previous session and one for the directory you want to work on. It's a pain to have to close what you were previously working on every time, so some people prefer to disable hot_exit and have sublime ask them if they want to save changes every time they close it.

I wanted to save the previous sessions in case I want to access them, but prevent them from opening when I just want to move on to something new. The last session is saved when you exit sublime to $SUBLIME_CONFIG_DIR/Local/Session.sublime_session. To get this effect I modifies the script that launches sublime /usr/bin/subl and /usr/bin/X11/subl (I'm on linux Mint, and have sublime installed to /opt/sublime_text, should be similar on Ubuntu, etc.) to look like the following.

#!/bin/bash

CURRENT_SESSION_DIR=~/.config/sublime-text-3/Local
SESSIONS_DIR=~/.config/sublime-text-3/Local/sessions
mkdir -p "$SESSIONS_DIR"

COUNT=`ls "$SESSIONS_DIR" | wc -l`


if [[ -e "$CURRENT_SESSION_DIR"/Session.sublime_session ]]; then

    if [ $COUNT -ge 3 ]; then
        rm "$SESSIONS_DIR"/Session3.sublime_session
        mv "$SESSIONS_DIR"/Session{2,3}.sublime_session
        mv "$SESSIONS_DIR"/Session{1,2}.sublime_session
    fi
    mv "$CURRENT_SESSION_DIR/Session.sublime_session" "$SESSIONS_DIR/Session1.sublime_session"

fi


if [ "$1" == "-l" ]; then
    if [ -f "$SESSIONS_DIR/Session$2.sublime_session" ]; then
        echo "Opening session: $SESSIONS_DIR/Session$2.sublime_session"
        cp "$SESSIONS_DIR/Session$2.sublime_session" "$CURRENT_SESSION_DIR/Session.sublime_session"
    fi
    shift
    shift
fi

exec /opt/sublime_text/sublime_text "$@"

Now I can open a fresh sublime with subl whatever and if I need to open previous sessions I do subl -l 1 for the last one or 2 or 3 for the previous ones.

The script works by moving the Session.sublime_session file to a backup location so sublime doesn't know there was a last session, and it starts fresh. It also rotates the filenames of the 3 last saved sessions and deletes the oldest one if you've got more than 3, and recovers them if you specify the -l flag.

Hope someone finds this helpful.

WARNING: I'm no bash wizard. The script is probably terrible, but I got it to work without problems. If it doesn't behave like you think it should, don't blame me, modify it, fix it, improve it, share your results.