Default Emacs Window-Buffer Pairings Upon Startup

Question

What is the idiomatic elisp way to have emacs start with N buffers, M windows, and M of those N buffers loaded into windows of a designated placement and size? Or maybe there's a nice plugin for this? Specifically, I want to have an emacs session like this upon startup:

In case version matters, I'm looking to use gnu emacs 24.3.

Answer 1

One easy way is to use an Emacs desktop (see the Emacs manual, node Saving Emacs Sessions ). Position things as you want, then save your setup as a desktop. (But you will need Emacs 24.4 to have the saved desktop include frame and window configurations.)

(If you use Bookmark+ then you can have multiple desktop bookmarks , and flip between them with a key.)

Otherwise, you will need to write some Elisp code to re-create your frames, windows, buffers etc. in your init file.