Restore Cursor Position On Tab Restore In Vim

Have you ever experienced the frustration of losing your cursor position when restoring a Vim session? You're not alone! Many Vim users find this behavior disruptive to their workflow. In this comprehensive guide, we'll dive deep into the intricacies of session management in Vim and explore how you can effectively restore your cursor position on each tabpage when restoring a session. We'll cover various techniques, configuration options, and best practices to ensure a smooth and efficient editing experience.

Understanding Vim's Session Management

Before we delve into the specifics of restoring cursor positions, let's first understand how Vim's session management works. Vim sessions allow you to save the current state of your Vim environment, including open buffers, window layouts, and various settings. This can be incredibly useful for resuming your work exactly where you left off, especially when dealing with complex projects or multiple files.

When you save a session using the :mksession command, Vim creates a session file (typically with the .vim extension) that contains instructions to recreate the current environment. This file stores information about open buffers, window arrangements, options, and more. When you later restore a session using the :source command followed by the session file, Vim executes these instructions to bring your Vim environment back to its saved state. However, by default, Vim's session management doesn't automatically restore the cursor position in each tabpage, which can lead to a jarring experience for users who rely on tabbed browsing.

Vim sessions are a powerful feature, but understanding their limitations is crucial for optimizing your workflow. The default behavior of not restoring cursor positions can be a significant inconvenience, particularly when you're working on multiple files across different tabs. Imagine having to manually navigate back to your last editing point in each tab every time you restore a session – it's a productivity killer! This is where the techniques and solutions we'll discuss in the following sections become invaluable.

To truly master Vim's session management, it's essential to experiment with different options and configurations. Try saving and restoring sessions with various window layouts, open buffers, and option settings. This hands-on experience will give you a deeper understanding of how sessions work and how you can tailor them to your specific needs. Remember, Vim is a highly customizable editor, and its session management capabilities are no exception. By investing the time to learn and configure sessions effectively, you can significantly enhance your productivity and streamline your workflow.

The ssop Option and Its Impact

The ssop option in Vim controls which settings are saved and restored as part of a session. It stands for "Session Options." This option is a comma-separated list of flags that determine what aspects of the Vim environment are included in the session file. Understanding the ssop option is crucial for customizing session behavior, including whether or not cursor positions are restored.

The ssop option can include flags such as globals, options, buffers, windows, and more. Each flag corresponds to a specific category of settings. For example, the globals flag indicates that global variables should be saved and restored, while the options flag controls the saving and restoring of Vim options. The buffers and windows flags, as you might expect, govern the saving and restoring of buffer lists and window layouts, respectively.

The original poster mentioned experimenting with the ssop option and encountering an issue when removing the options flag. Specifically, they had the following line in their Vim configuration:

set ssop+=globals ssop-=options

The intention behind this was likely to save global variables but avoid saving options. The reason for removing options often stems from a desire to maintain a consistent Vim environment across different sessions or to prevent specific option settings from being overwritten when a session is restored. However, as the poster discovered, removing the options flag can have unintended consequences, particularly regarding cursor position restoration.

When the options flag is excluded from the ssop setting, Vim does not save and restore the values of certain options that are crucial for cursor position tracking. This includes options like 'cursorline', 'cursorcolumn', and 'ruler', which control the display and behavior of the cursor. Without these options being properly saved and restored, Vim may not be able to accurately determine the cursor position in each tabpage when a session is restored.

The key takeaway here is that the ssop option plays a vital role in session management, and carefully considering which flags to include or exclude is essential. While removing the options flag might seem like a way to prevent unwanted option changes, it can inadvertently disable features like cursor position restoration. In the following sections, we'll explore alternative approaches to managing options and ensuring that cursor positions are correctly restored in your Vim sessions.

For most users, it's generally recommended to include the options flag in the ssop setting unless there's a specific reason to exclude it. If you're experiencing issues with option settings being overwritten when restoring sessions, there are often more targeted solutions than removing the options flag altogether. For instance, you can use autocommands or conditional logic in your vimrc file to set specific options based on the session being restored. We'll delve into these techniques later in the guide.

Techniques for Restoring Cursor Position

Now, let's explore the core techniques for restoring the cursor position on each tabpage when restoring a Vim session. We'll cover several approaches, ranging from simple configuration options to more advanced scripting solutions. By the end of this section, you'll have a toolkit of methods to choose from, allowing you to select the one that best fits your needs and preferences.

1. Ensuring 'sessionoptions' Includes "cursor"

The most straightforward way to restore cursor positions is to ensure that the cursor flag is included in the 'sessionoptions' setting. This option, distinct from ssop, specifically controls which aspects of the cursor position are saved and restored. By default, the 'sessionoptions' setting often includes flags like buffers, curdir, folds, help, options, tabpages, and winsize. To enable cursor position restoration, you need to add the cursor flag to this list.

You can do this by adding the following line to your vimrc file:

set sessionoptions+=cursor

This command appends the cursor flag to the existing 'sessionoptions' setting. Alternatively, if you want to explicitly set the 'sessionoptions' value, you can use the following:

set sessionoptions=buffers,curdir,folds,help,options,tabpages,winsize,cursor

After adding this setting, save your vimrc file and restart Vim or source it using :source $MYVIMRC. Now, when you save and restore a session, Vim should automatically restore the cursor position in each tabpage.

This technique is the simplest and most recommended approach for most users. It leverages Vim's built-in session management capabilities and provides a reliable way to restore cursor positions without requiring complex scripting or configuration. However, it's essential to understand that this method relies on the 'sessionoptions' setting being properly configured. If you have other settings that interfere with session management, this technique might not work as expected.

For instance, if you've explicitly disabled session saving or restoring for certain aspects of the Vim environment, the cursor flag might be ignored. In such cases, you'll need to review your Vim configuration and ensure that it's not conflicting with the 'sessionoptions' setting. Additionally, if you're using plugins that modify session behavior, they might also affect cursor position restoration. It's always a good practice to test your session management setup thoroughly after making changes to your Vim configuration or installing new plugins.

2. Using Autocommands for Fine-Grained Control

For more advanced control over cursor position restoration, you can use autocommands. Autocommands are Vim's event-driven mechanism for executing commands automatically when specific events occur. In the context of session management, we can use autocommands to save and restore cursor positions explicitly.

Here's a basic example of how to use autocommands to save and restore cursor positions: