jQuery Grid Plugin - jqGrid

I am looking for example on how to persist which columns are visible or hidden based on the end users preferences, figure the cleanest way to do this is with cookies.  Also I would like to do the same with filtering, where I have multipleSearch set to true.

I found an example on how to set the default sort using onSortCol property, like this:

<here's how to set the cookie on the sort stuff>

onSortCol: function (indexName, indexCol, sortOrder) {

   $.cookie("index", indexName);

   $.cookie("order", sortOrder);

}

<here's how to get the cookie for use>

sortname: $.cookie("index") ? $.cookie("index") : "myDefaultColumnName");

sortorder: $.cookie("order") ? $.cookie("order") : "asc");

Tips for how to do this with showing/hiding columns and the filtering of the data would be very much appreciated.

Thanks in advance for any help.