This library provides functions for managing named timers. The usual pattern for timer management in Emacs Lisp involves declaring a timer variable, checking it for an existing timer, cancelling that timer if it exists, setting the varaible to nil to indicate that the timer is no longer active, and finally starting a new timer and setting the variable to that value. For example:
(require 'timer)
(defvar my-timer nil)
(defun activate-my-timer ()
(when my-timer
(cancel-timer my-timer)
(setq my-timer nil))
(setq my-timer
(run-with-timer 5 nil #'message "My timer ran!")))With named timers, this simplifies to a single line:
(require 'named-timer)
(defun activate-my-timer ()
(named-timer-run :my-timer 5 nil #'message "My timer ran!"))In addition to being shorter, this code is less error prone: since running a named timer automatically cancels any existing timer with the same name, there is no chance of accidentally leaving multiple timers by forgetting to cancel old timers. In short, all the functions in this library are idempotent, which makes them much easier to reason about.
The basic functions for managing named timers named-timer-run~,
named-timer-idle-run, and named-timer-cancel, which are,
respectively, analogues of run-with-timer, run-with-idle-timer,
and cancel-timer.