Perspective is an emacs package by Nathan Weizenbaum, which offers the possibility of working with different workspaces. If you are used to a windows manager (like Fluxbox, Gnome, KDE etc. for instance), you know the advantages of switching between several desktops or setting up different desktops for your purposes.

In my daily grind I switch often between projects, fixing a bug there or reading some source codes here. This possibility of working this way is extremely helpful. It's hard imagining not to be able to use it.

Perspective gives you tagged workspaces and because each perspective (workspace) is composed of a window configuration and a set of buffers, switching to a perspective will only make the buffers available which belong to it.

Here's how to use it

First you have to install perspective, you get the source on Github.

Then you need to put the perspective.el file somewhere in your load-path and add the following to your ~/.emacs file.

;; Load Perspective
(require 'perspective)
;; Toggle the perspective mode
(persp-mode)

From now on you are ready to go. Perspective is easy to use and you will be familiar with its functionality in no time.

What you will use mostly are persp-switch. With this function you switch to the perspective you want, if the specified perspective doesn't exist, it will create a new one and switch to it.

Sometimes you need to rename a perspective and for this action use the function persp-rename.

Another useful function is persp-add-buffer, just add a buffer to your chosen perspective. The vice-versa function of it is persp-remove-buffer.

More functions

pesp-kill just kill a not anymore used perspective.

persp-import import a perspective from another frame.

Some customization

Yves Senn, a friend of mine did a great job customizing perspective. He defined a macro which takes two arguments : the name for the perspective and the body which contains the code that will be evaluated after creating the perspective. So what you can do now is to define your custom function using the macro.

(defmacro custom-persp (name &rest body)
       `(let ((initialize (not (gethash ,name perspectives-hash)))
              (current-perspective persp-curr))
          (persp-switch ,name)
          (when initialize ,@body)
          (setq persp-last current-perspective)))

For instance, create a @org named perspective and open the first agenda file.

(defun custom-persp/org ()
  (interactive)
  (custom-persp "@org"
  (find-file (first org-agenda-files))))

At last, just create a key binding for the function.

(global-set-key (kbd "C-p o") 'custom-persp/org)

You find the whole source in the emacs-configs repository from Yves Senn.

Summary

Perspective is definitly a well written package

I recommend reading through the Perspective source and make yourself more familiar with whats going on beyond all these functions.