When saveplace.el reaches save-place-limit, the file positions retained via ~/.emacs-places are the first limit-many in alphabetical order. I hoped instead it would be the first limit-many most recently used. Ie. drop the least recently visited files in order to enforce the limit. I struck this when I reached my save-place-limit with lots of files I had visited long ago but which happened to be alphabetically before ones I was visiting now. The save-place feature no longer saved places across sessions for files I now visited. The effect can be seen by setting a small limit per init.el below. Then foo.el to visit three files successively HOME=`pwd` emacs -Q -l ./init.el -l ./foo.el This leaves .emacs-places (in the current directory due to faked $HOME) containing (("/tmp/aa" . 4) ("/tmp/bb" . 4) ("/tmp/cc" . 4)) Notice /tmp/cc was the most recently visited file but it's at the end of the list and will be truncated when load-save-place-alist-from-file enforces save-place-limit of 2. HOME=`pwd` emacs -Q -l ./init.el /tmp/cc => point is at start of buffer /tmp/cc I hoped it would be at the end from the last visit Note that you must exit and restart emacs to see the effect, because save-place-limit is only enforced by load-save-place-alist-from-file. Within a session there's no limit, only in reading the .emacs-places file on restarting emacs. I get some joy from not sorting save-place-alist when saving per change below. I believe save-place-to-alist keeps save-place-alist in "most recent first" order (by delq and re-push to move an existing entry to the start), and that that order should be preserved when saving. 2013-03-04 Kevin Ryde * saveplace.el (save-place-alist-to-file): Don't `sort' save-place-alist alphabetically, keep it in "most recent first" order. This ensures save-place-limit drops the least recently visited files, not the alphabetically last files. Dropping alphabetically last files had meant save-place stopped working across sessions after .emacs-places filled with alphabetically early names.