38.4.3 Logging Messages in ‘*Messages*’

Almost all the messages displayed in the echo area are also recorded in the ‘*Messages*’ buffer so that the user can refer back to them. This includes all the messages that are output with message.

User Option: message-log-max

This variable specifies how many lines to keep in the ‘*Messages*’ buffer. The value t means there is no limit on how many lines to keep. The value nil disables message logging entirely. Here's how to display a message and prevent it from being logged:

(let (message-log-max) (message …))

To make ‘*Messages*’ more convenient for the user, the logging facility combines successive identical messages. It also combines successive related messages for the sake of two cases: question followed by answer, and a series of progress messages.

A “question followed by an answer” means two messages like the ones produced by y-or-n-p: the first is ‘question’, and the second is ‘question...answer’. The first message conveys no additional information beyond what's in the second, so logging the second message discards the first from the log.

A “series of progress messages” means successive messages like those produced by make-progress-reporter. They have the form ‘base...how-far’, where base is the same each time, while how-far varies. Logging each message in the series discards the previous one, provided they are consecutive.

The functions make-progress-reporter and y-or-n-p don't have to do anything special to activate the message log combination feature. It operates whenever two consecutive messages are logged that share a common prefix ending in ‘...’.

Ce document a été généré par Eric Reinbold le 13 Octobre 2007 en utilisant texi2html 1.78.