How to show a message in the echo area not immediately but after a certain delay and to disappear it after a certain delay

Question

The following show the message "something" in the echo area immediately, and this message remains there unless I do a second action (e.g. moving the cursor, executing anther command etc)

(message "something")

I would like that the message to not appear immediately, but after a delay of few second (say 2 seconds) and to automatically disappear after few second (say 3 second). Is this possible?

To be precise I would like that in the first delay of 2 seconds, I would able to see other system messages (if any).

Answer 1

You could try something like:

(run-with-timer 2 nil
        (lambda ()
          (message "Some message")
          (run-with-timer 3 nil
                  (lambda ()
                    (message nil)))))

run-with-timer will call a function of your choice after a delay (there's a run-with-idle-timer variant if you want to only show the message when Emacs is idle). I've used lambda here to create an anonymous function with the body of code I want to run.

The example shows a message then schedules a second timer to clear the echo-area.

This is a bit clumsy since there might be somebody else's message in the echo area by the time the second timer fires, so you may end up clearing a different message. There's probably a way to avoid that with some more work.

Edit: changed (message "") to (message nil) to clear the echo-area and return to showing any minibuffer contents (thanks Drew!)