I have used many editors (chiefly vim) and IDEs (pycharm) My colleagues use sublime text so I gave it a try, but always switched back to either pycharm for python coding, and vim for everything else (until I came across spacemacs, and now that is my main editor for last few months. I still use vim occasionally, on remote server etc.)

Back to sublime text ..

One of the thing I liked about sublime text was that I could just open a new window, start typing and even after I quit/restart sublime, my contents would be there.

So even log after I stopped using sublime for coding, I continued using it mainly for this purpose alone.

I have several such “windows” from few months ago, and I found what I wanted there (Since I started using space/emacs, I have started using org-capture for such things, but I still find myself using sublime for creating persistent scratch buffers)

It never occurred to me to look for similar functionality in emacs (kinda highlights my noob status, since an experienced emacs user knows that nothing is impossible with emacs) and then I came across this reddit thread.

persistent-scratch

Installing it is a simple matter of adding it to dotspacemacs-additional-packages, and then SPC f e R

At first, I got file-error since package list was stale. Restarting spacemacs fixed that (turns out I could have easily done M-x package-refresh-contents)

Then I had to add (persistent-scratch-setup-default) to my dotspacemacs/user-config, and that's it.

I now have scratch buffer that will retain its contents across restarts.

parting thoughts

I still think this is not same as what sublime text does.

The reddit thread also mentions open-junk-file (which is exactly my use case, since I don't care about the filename or its location, just the contents) but open-junk-file creates files using timestamp.

Plus, using single scratch buffer is not same as ability to use as many scratch buffers as needed. I guess I can always have one giant *scratch* buffer, divided using org-mode headings

But then why not simply use org-capture ? That is what it is meant for, isn't it ?

Oh, well …

Update : Feb 27, 2018

For several months now, I am using TextWrangler on macOS, which has similar feature that retains the contents of “new” buffer across restarts without having to explicitly save the contents.