Delayed Warnings

Sometimes, you may wish to avoid showing a warning while a command is running, and only show it only after the end of the command. You can use the function delay-warning for this. Emacs automatically delays any warnings emitted during the early stages of startup, and shows them only after the init files are processed.

Function: delay-warning type message &optional level buffer-name

This function is the delayed counterpart to display-warning (see Warning Basics), and it is called with the same arguments. The warning message is queued into delayed-warnings-list.

Variable: delayed-warnings-list

The value of this variable is a list of warnings to be displayed after the current command has finished. Each element must be a list

(type message [level [buffer-name]])

with the same form, and the same meanings, as the argument list of display-warning. Immediately after running post-command-hook (see Command Loop Overview), the Emacs command loop displays all the warnings specified by this variable, then resets the variable to nil.

Programs which need to further customize the delayed warnings mechanism can change the variable delayed-warnings-hook:

Variable: delayed-warnings-hook

This is a normal hook which is run by the Emacs command loop, after post-command-hook, in order to process and display delayed warnings. Emacs also runs this hook during startup, after loading the site-start and user init files (see Summary: Sequence of Actions at Startup), because warnings emitted before that are automatically delayed.

Its default value is a list of two functions:

(collapse-delayed-warnings display-delayed-warnings)

The function collapse-delayed-warnings removes repeated entries from delayed-warnings-list. The function display-delayed-warnings calls display-warning on each of the entries in delayed-warnings-list, in turn, and then sets delayed-warnings-list to nil.