emacs-evil / evil

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Question

Is there any way to restrict certain buffers being added to the jump list?

I use dirvish, which is a wrapper around dired. Often times after I'm done using dirvish, I press q to bury its buffer. These visits get added to the evil jump list.

I'd like to avoid this behaviour for a few reasons:

Dirvish follows my current directory whenever I open it, so from my point of view, there is only ever one global dirvish buffer that I can open or dismiss - I don't need to access it using the jump list.
Dirvish has its own jump list, which I've bound (or would like to bind) to the same keys I've bound my evil jump list commands to. This jump list implements a directory visiting history.

I'm not sure if this behavior is specific to dirvish, or if it's the same with plain dired as well - I haven't tested that.

I would possibly even like to restrict the jump list to only file-visiting buffers, but I'm not sure if that's exactly what I want yet.

Have you tried adding patterns to evil-jumps-ignored-file-patterns ? I haven't tried it myself, but looks like it should work. Let me know if it doesn't.

Have you tried adding patterns to evil-jumps-ignored-file-patterns ? I haven't tried it myself, but looks like it should work. Let me know if it doesn't.

That sounds like what I want. I couldn't find any mention of it in the docs. I'll try it out in a bit.

Do you know if non-file-visiting buffers being added to the jump list is expected behavior?

There's handling for non-file-visiting buffers in the code, so I'd say it probably is expected behaviour.

edit: ah that handling says if the buffer has no filename, but it does match evil--jumps-buffer-targets then it's a valid jump target. So unless you add non-file-visiting buffer patterns there, I guess not.

Looks like this custom variable does what I need.

evil/evil-jumps.el

Line 55 in 16506d9

(defcustom evil-jumps-ignored-file-patterns '("COMMIT_EDITMSG$" "TAGS$")

I got around to actually trying to implement the fix, but I'm running into some issues.

The buffers I wanted to ignore are dired buffers, and dired buffers are just set to the name of whatever directory they are visiting by default.

I tried to rename the dired buffers, figuring I could just match on them that way:

(use-package evil
  ;; ...
  :config
  (evil-mode 1)
  (add-hook 'dired-mode-hook (lambda () (rename-buffer (generate-new-buffer-name (format "*Dired: %s*" dired-directory)))))
  (add-to-list 'evil-jumps-ignored-file-patterns "\*Dirvish.*")
  (add-to-list 'evil-jumps-ignored-file-patterns "\*Dired:.*"))

But this doesn't seem to work. I'm guessing evil adds it to the jump list before the rename occurs? :/

Working back from the source code, I was able to come up with this:

(use-package evil
  :config
  (evil-mode 1)
  (add-to-list 'evil-jumps-ignored-file-patterns ".*/$"))

This works because the filename that evil internally assigns to dired buffers always ends with a / character.

Perhaps a evil-jump-visit-dired-buffers custom variable or similar would be a nice-to-have.

Restrict adding certain buffers to jump list

Issue type