Avoid losing window layout when editing org code blocks

Org-mode has a nice feature that allow us to edit source code within an org file, for more info check the docs. But it has a little annoying behavior after we are done editing a source block. It loses the previous window configuration and always closes all the windows except the org window.

In the image below we can see this behavior:

To solve this problem we can use a register to save the current window configuration just before the source code edition buffer is opened and when it's closed we can restore the previous configuration just getting the value from the register used before. We're defining two functions to accomplish this behavior, one to run before and one after we're done editing the source block.

(defconst my/org-edit-block-register ?o)

(defun my/org-edit-special (&optional arg)
  "Save current window configuration before a org-edit buffer is open."
  (set-register my/org-edit-block-register (current-window-configuration)))

(defun my/org-edit-src-exit ()
  "Restore the window configuration that was saved before org-edit-special was called."
  (set-window-configuration (get-register my/org-edit-block-register)))

Now we need to "attach" these two functions to the default behavior of org-mode, to do this we can use advice-add elisp function, this function allow us to "attach" some functionality to an existing function.

The two functions that we need to advice are:

• org-edit-special: this function is called when we press C-c C-' and allow us to edit source block in a dedicated buffer.

• org-edit-src-exit: this function is called when we press C-c C-' from inside of the opened buffer, it closes the buffer and return us to the org buffer.

my/org-edit-special will run just before org-edit-special is called and my/org-edit-src-exit after org-edit-src-exit is called.

We need to execute this code after org is loaded so we use eval-after-load.

(eval-after-load "org"
  `(progn
     (advice-add 'org-edit-special :before 'my/org-edit-special)
     (advice-add 'org-edit-src-exit :after 'my/org-edit-src-exit)))

The full code will be:

(defconst my/org-edit-block-register ?o)

(defun my/org-edit-special (&optional arg)
  "Save current window configuration before a org-edit buffer is open."
  (set-register my/org-edit-block-register (current-window-configuration)))

(defun my/org-edit-src-exit ()
  "Restore the window configuration that was saved before org-edit-special was called."
  (set-window-configuration (get-register my/org-edit-block-register)))

(eval-after-load "org"
  `(progn
     (advice-add 'org-edit-special :before 'my/org-edit-special)
     (advice-add 'org-edit-src-exit :after 'my/org-edit-src-exit)))

After applying the complete code the result will be:

Enjoy!