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What is the right way to perform hierarchical logging in Emacs Lisp?

As a representative example…

(scoped-message "baking cake" (progn (scoped-message "making batter" (progn (scoped-message "whisking eggs" (whisk-eggs)) …)) …))

I would like to see something like baking cake → making batter → whisking eggs in the Messages butter and in the mode line.

Is there a library, macro, or standard idiom that makes this easy?

The library straight.el does this when building dependent libraries (e.g. building org-drill → org-contrib), but it's built in a very custom way. Is there a standard solution available?

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  • I do not see a big need for such a library since the effect is easily obtained by let-binding: (let ((scoped-message "baking cake")) (let ((scoped-message (concat scoped-message " → making batter"))) (message (concat scoped-message " → whisking eggs")))) Pityingly the line ends are lost in the comment and therefore the structure information associated with the line ends is lost. Nevertheless it is more a comment instead of an answer... Commented Dec 22, 2018 at 23:14

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Noting that this is more or less along the lines of how run-mode-hooks and delay-mode-hooks interact, you could do something similar to that:

(defvar scoped-message-p nil) (defvar scoped-messages nil) (defmacro scoped-message (message &rest body) (declare (indent 1)) `(progn (if scoped-message-p (push ,message scoped-messages) (setq scoped-messages (list ,message))) (let ((scoped-message-p t)) ,@body) (unless scoped-message-p (message "%s" (mapconcat #'identity (nreverse scoped-messages) " → ")))))
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