If you've been using Emacs for a while, I bet you must have encountered the annoying problem that your Emacs window layout gets messed up after some operations, such as looking for a help (e.g. C-h k), or checking things in the magit status buffer.
I'm happy if I can just get back to the previous layout that I had before, and guess what? Emacs happens to have that capability built in – the winner-mode package, what a surprise!
It's very simple. Actually, it only has three commands:
M-x winner-mode, to enable/disable the functionC-c left (winner-undo), to go back to a previous layout, execute it repeatedly to go back furtherC-c right (winner-redo), to go back again to a recent layout. Unfortunately, we can't execute it more than once in a row.
But for winner-undo, it's a little bit tedious to type a lot of C-c left if you have to go back a long way. Don't worry, we can avoid that with a little help of a hydra recipe:
(defhydra hydra (global-map "C-c w")
"Navigate the time machine of the window layout"
("p" winner-undo "Previous layout")
("n" winner-redo "Next layout"))
Now, we can go a few layouts back easily. For example, typing C-c w p p will get us to the layout before the previous layout.
Check out this youtube episode of mine to see how that works:
UPDATE: After I posted this, @hmelman left a comment below saying that it's possible to save typing by using built-in repeat-mode since Emacs 28, thanks man!
So here is how to do that in Emacs 28 by defining a keymap using repeat-mode, nice! And, if you're using Emacs >= 29, you don't even have to tweak anything at all!
(defvar w/winner-repeat-map
(let ((map (make-sparse-keymap)))
(define-key map (kbd "<left>") 'winner-undo)
(define-key map (kbd "<right>") 'winner-redo)
map)
"Keymap to repeat `winner' key sequences. Used in `repeat-mode'.")
(put 'winner-undo 'repeat-map 'w/winner-repeat-map)
(put 'winner-redo 'repeat-map 'w/winner-repeat-map)
(repeat-mode) ; enable it