2010-04-04 John Wiegley <jwiegley@gmail.com> * ido.el (ido-use-virtual-buffers): New variable to indicate whether "virtual buffer" support is enabled for IDO. Essentially it works as follows: Say you are visiting a file and the buffer gets cleaned up by mignight.el. Later, you want to switch to that buffer, but find it's no longer open. With virtual buffers enabled, the buffer name stays in the buffer list (using the ido-virtual face, and always at the end), and if you select it, it opens the file back up again. This allows you to think less about whether recently opened files are still open or not. Most of the time you can quit Emacs, restart, and then switch to a file buffer that was previously open as if it still were. NOTE: This feature has been present in iswitchb for several years now, and I'm porting the same logic to IDO. (ido-virtual): Face used to indicate virtual buffers in the list. (ido-buffer-internal): If a buffer is chosen, and no such buffer exists, but a virtual buffer of that name does (which would be why it was in the list), recreate the buffer by reopening the file. (ido-make-buffer-list): If virtual buffers are being used, call `ido-add-virtual-buffers-to-list' before the make list hook. (ido-virtual-buffers): New variable which contains a copy of the current contents of the `recentf-list', albeit pared down for the sake of speed, and with proper faces applied. (ido-add-virtual-buffers-to-list): Using the `recentf-list', create a list of "virtual buffers" to present to the user in addition to the currently open set. Note that this logic could get rather slow if that list is too large. With the default `recentf-max-saved-items' of 200, there is little speed penalty.