38.11 Timers for Delayed Execution

You can set up a timer to call a function at a specified future time or after a certain length of idleness.

Emacs cannot run timers at any arbitrary point in a Lisp program; it can run them only when Emacs could accept output from a subprocess: namely, while waiting or inside certain primitive functions such as sit-for or read-event which can wait. Therefore, a timer’s execution may be delayed if Emacs is busy. However, the time of execution is very precise if Emacs is idle.

Emacs binds inhibit-quit to t before calling the timer function, because quitting out of many timer functions can leave things in an inconsistent state. This is normally unproblematical because most timer functions don’t do a lot of work. Indeed, for a timer to call a function that takes substantial time to run is likely to be annoying. If a timer function needs to allow quitting, it should use with-local-quit (see Quitting). For example, if a timer function calls accept-process-output to receive output from an external process, that call should be wrapped inside with-local-quit, to ensure that C-g works if the external process hangs.

It is usually a bad idea for timer functions to alter buffer contents. When they do, they usually should call undo-boundary both before and after changing the buffer, to separate the timer’s changes from user commands’ changes and prevent a single undo entry from growing to be quite large.

Timer functions should also avoid calling functions that cause Emacs to wait, such as sit-for (see Waiting). This can lead to unpredictable effects, since other timers (or even the same timer) can run while waiting. If a timer function needs to perform an action after a certain time has elapsed, it can do this by scheduling a new timer.

If a timer function calls functions that can change the match data, it should save and restore the match data. See Saving Match Data.

Command: run-at-time time repeat function &rest args

This sets up a timer that calls the function function with arguments args at time time. If repeat is a number (integer or floating point), the timer is scheduled to run again every repeat seconds after time. If repeat is nil, the timer runs only once.

time may specify an absolute or a relative time.

Absolute times may be specified using a string with a limited variety of formats, and are taken to be times today, even if already in the past. The recognized forms are ‘xxxx’, ‘x:xx’, or ‘xx:xx’ (military time), and ‘xxam’, ‘xxAM’, ‘xxpm’, ‘xxPM’, ‘xx:xxam’, ‘xx:xxAM’, ‘xx:xxpm’, or ‘xx:xxPM’. A period can be used instead of a colon to separate the hour and minute parts.

To specify a relative time as a string, use numbers followed by units. For example:

‘1 min’

denotes 1 minute from now.

‘1 min 5 sec’

denotes 65 seconds from now.

‘1 min 2 sec 3 hour 4 day 5 week 6 fortnight 7 month 8 year’

denotes exactly 103 months, 123 days, and 10862 seconds from now.

For relative time values, Emacs considers a month to be exactly thirty days, and a year to be exactly 365.25 days.

Not all convenient formats are strings. If time is a number (integer or floating point), that specifies a relative time measured in seconds. The result of encode-time can also be used to specify an absolute value for time.

In most cases, repeat has no effect on when first call takes place—time alone specifies that. There is one exception: if time is t, then the timer runs whenever the time is a multiple of repeat seconds after the epoch. This is useful for functions like display-time.

The function run-at-time returns a timer value that identifies the particular scheduled future action. You can use this value to call cancel-timer (see below).

A repeating timer nominally ought to run every repeat seconds, but remember that any invocation of a timer can be late. Lateness of one repetition has no effect on the scheduled time of the next repetition. For instance, if Emacs is busy computing for long enough to cover three scheduled repetitions of the timer, and then starts to wait, it will immediately call the timer function three times in immediate succession (presuming no other timers trigger before or between them). If you want a timer to run again no less than n seconds after the last invocation, don’t use the repeat argument. Instead, the timer function should explicitly reschedule the timer.

User Option: timer-max-repeats

This variable’s value specifies the maximum number of times to repeat calling a timer function in a row, when many previously scheduled calls were unavoidably delayed.

Macro: with-timeout (seconds timeout-forms…) body…

Execute body, but give up after seconds seconds. If body finishes before the time is up, with-timeout returns the value of the last form in body. If, however, the execution of body is cut short by the timeout, then with-timeout executes all the timeout-forms and returns the value of the last of them.

This macro works by setting a timer to run after seconds seconds. If body finishes before that time, it cancels the timer. If the timer actually runs, it terminates execution of body, then executes timeout-forms.

Since timers can run within a Lisp program only when the program calls a primitive that can wait, with-timeout cannot stop executing body while it is in the midst of a computation—only when it calls one of those primitives. So use with-timeout only with a body that waits for input, not one that does a long computation.

The function y-or-n-p-with-timeout provides a simple way to use a timer to avoid waiting too long for an answer. See Yes-or-No Queries.

Function: cancel-timer timer

This cancels the requested action for timer, which should be a timer—usually, one previously returned by run-at-time or run-with-idle-timer. This cancels the effect of that call to one of these functions; the arrival of the specified time will not cause anything special to happen.