[ESS] new user questions: appending to transcripts and buffer management

[Alex Bokov]

I've been working with R for a couple of years, but I have taken the 
plunge into emacs and ESS only recently. I was surprised by how much I 
was able to figure out about using ESS by searching on my own, but the 
following two questions are still stumping me and I hope someone here 
can help.

1.    If I quit an R session without quitting the buffer then later 
start a new one in that buffer, it will append to the existing buffer 
contents after delimiting them with a form-feed. This would be an 
improvement over the native loadhistory() and savehistory() method, 
except that it only works until I have to quit emacs. I cannot just save 
the transcript file with C-x C-w and restore the buffer state from it 
later.  The .St file gets opened in ess-transcript mode instead of in 
R-mode and even though I can still send previous commands to an R 
process in a separate buffer, there doesn't seem to be any way to append 
to the original .St file. If I save the new R buffer to an .St file, it 
overwrites the original.

How can I either append to an .St file or in some other way restore the 
exact state of an R buffer after rebooting my laptop?

2.    Emacs in general and ESS in particular spams me like crazy with 
various temporary buffers. What I would like to do is have one frame 
with a small collection of buffers I selected that I can cycle through 
using previous-buffer and next-buffer. All other buffers would be 
completely banned from that frame no matter how important emacs thinks 
they are and they would be instead be forced to use a separate frame.

It would also be nice to automatically kill certain sessions as soon as 
they stop being in the foreground, but for now I'll settle just for 
segregating them all in one frame.

Any suggestions on how to do that?



Thank you