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. By default, this buffer is read-only and uses the major
messages-buffer-mode. Nothing prevents the user from
killing the *Messages* buffer, but the next display of a message
recreates it. Any Lisp code that needs to access the
*Messages* buffer directly and wants to ensure that it exists
should use the function
This function returns the *Messages* buffer. If it does not exist, it creates it, and switches it to
This variable specifies how many lines to keep in the *Messages* buffer. The value
tmeans there is no limit on how many lines to keep. The value
nildisables 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.
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 ‘...’.