Re: remember all the little quits before you do the big quit :)

[Eric Abrahamsen]

Hikaru Ichijyo <ichijyo@macross.sdf.jp> writes:

> In the Gnus manual, it says:
>
> This message means that the last time you used Gnus, it wasn’t properly
> exited and therefore couldn’t write its information to disk (e.g., which
> messages you read), you are now asked if you want to restore that
> information from the auto-save file.
>
> To prevent this message make sure you exit Gnus via ‘q’ in group
> buffer instead of just killing Emacs.
>
> This is a good idea to avoid getting prompted about autosave files next
> time you start Gnus.  Emacs-W3M and ERC have their own quit commands,
> and seem also to prefer you didn't just quit your whole Emacs session
> while they're still around.
>
> Emacs checks to see if you have unsaved buffers at exit, and will prompt
> you if there are running subordinate processes...but it's a little picky
> about what it considers a "process," mostly meaning that in the sense of
> processes in the underlying OS, not Lisp programs like Gnus or
> Emacs-W3M.
>
> It would be nice if Emacs would give options on shutdown to terminate
> Lisp applications in the same fashion it checks for unsaved buffers and
> subordinate Unix processes.  I know there are probably ways people have
> hacked together solutions for this in their ~/.emacs files (and I'd love
> to see them, if anybody wants to post snippets), but it just seems like
> if Emacs is taking the effort to warn me of things I need to take care
> of before shutdown, it shouldn't be forgetting about its own running
> applications just because they're not OS processes.

Not too long ago I put in a patch that allows non-file-visiting buffers
to advertise themselves as savable to `save-some-buffers'. If you set
the buffer-local variable `buffer-offer-save' to the symbol `always',
and add a function to `write-contents-functions' that handles the save,
it will happen as part of the `save-buffers-kill-emacs' process. That's
pretty recent, though.

Eric