Xfce Forum

advice1010

Member

Registered: 2023-02-19

Posts: 148

Save your current session

In the past at some point I wanted to get into the idea of being able to save an exact snapshot of my current session.
Meaning all the windows currently opened, locations of those windows on screen, the current files opened in those applications, etc.

I had come across/heard about XFCE Sessions and figured that this was exactly what I was looking for and when I was ready to achieve this I would just use this.
After recently taking the time to look into Sessions, it was quite a disappointment to realize this feature is not fully functional. It was explained to me that it really is not a viable feature any longer and no real point to update, especially if Wayland will eventually be adopted.
As is this Sessions feature cannot save every application, which basically eliminates the point of this feature.
I was told that each application itself would have to be designed to support what "Sessions" requires so obviously this is not practical.

Which leads me to my question, does anyone know if there are any ways to achieve something like this?
Do not know if I would really want to use 3rd party application to achieve this, but would at least like to look into how complex it would or would not be.

I know you can use applications such as "wmctrl" but as far as I know these can only open new instances of applications and put them in a specific location on your screen, but they cannot actually save a snapshot of your current "session" with the specific files loaded in each application.
For example, a specific text file loaded in a text editor or a specific web page in a web browser, etc.

If anyone has any ideas, please let me know.
Thank you to anyone who reads this

advice1010

Member

Registered: 2023-02-19

Posts: 148

Re: Save your current session

Still interested if anyone has any ideas about this.
Thank You

ToZ

Administrator

From: Canada

Registered: 2011-06-02

Posts: 12,189

Re: Save your current session

While it might be possible to come up with a script (using wmctrl) to save and restore open programs and associated screen geometry, it will never be able to open the last used file or website - that is something that only the app would know about and could do.

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eriefisher

Wanderer

From: ON, Canada

Registered: 2008-10-25

Posts: 762

Re: Save your current session

Certain applications remember what they were doing before they shut down but not all. For instance, Firefox can be set to open in it's past state with web pages loaded. I believe most browsers do this. For text editing, I don't think Leafpad can remember but Geany can and does out of the box. Point is, it would be a mix of apps where some can and some can't remember where they were so a script would have to determine where everything was at the point of shutdown and then be able to reinstate it again at startup. Tricky but not impossible I guess.

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kagot

Member

Registered: 2025-07-28

Posts: 5

Re: Save your current session

depending whut u want achieve exactly u actually can
https://superuser.com/questions/419186/ … condary-os
but in several scenarios it can lead to serious data loss
feel free to experiment tho and you should read about ram installed save states