Is there a way to save additional context settings in a conversation?

[brickZA]

OK, so I (horrors) need to restart my emacs process, but I'm knee-deep in a long conversation with specific context (source code files, etc) added. How do I save the context settings along with the actual chat log? When I save my file I see the following local vars:

<!-- Local Variables: -->
<!-- gptel-model: claude-sonnet-4-20250514 -->
<!-- gptel--backend-name: "AWS" -->
<!-- gptel--bounds: ((response (391 2078) (2214 4136))) -->
<!-- End: -->

It does not say anything about the loaded context that I can see. Is there a way to get my chat session back to exactly where it was when I restart emacs?

[karthink]

Emacs buffers and regions are not serializable, so if you've added regions or buffers to the context there is no way to restore it in a new Emacs session.

If you've added only files, it should be possible but I haven't added it yet because of issues (See #475).

Another approach is to add the context as links to files in your Markdown buffer (#481), then it's part of the buffer/file text and automatically persisted.

[karthink]

You can now add a list of files to the newly added user option gptel-context, and save it as a file-local variable. This will save the context sources to the file. See the documentation of gptel-context for details.