Emacs Optionally Saving Desktop on Exit With Confirmation

I recently read an article about connecting different Emacs functions; unfortunately I can’t recall the title or url of the article.

After having the idea of that article in the back of my mind for a bit, it connected with one of the things I wanted to do with my Emacs: give myself the option¹ to save the state of Emacs upon exiting.

I knew about Saving Emacs Sessions. The only remaining thing was connecting desktop-save to killing Emacs.

The first thought crossing my mind was advising save-buffers-kill-terminal function, bound to C-x C-c which is the way I quit Emacs.

Visuwesh was quick to point me towards kill-emacs-hook and thus the final solution is the following hook:

(use-package emacs
  :ensure nil
  :hook
  (kill-emacs . (lambda () (if (y-or-n-p "Save desktop?")
                              (desktop-save (expand-file-name "~/.emacs.d/") t)))))

• Onthisday:228
• Emacs