Skip to main content

18 Debugging Lisp Programs

There are several ways to find and investigate problems in an Emacs Lisp program.

  • If a problem occurs when you run the program, you can use the built-in Emacs Lisp debugger to suspend the Lisp evaluator, and examine and/or alter its internal state.
  • You can use Edebug, a source-level debugger for Emacs Lisp.
  • You can trace the execution of functions involved in the problem using the tracing facilities provided by the trace.el package. This package provides the functions trace-function-foreground and trace-function-background for tracing function calls, and trace-values for adding values of select variables to the trace. For the details, see the documentation of these facilities in trace.el.
  • If a syntactic problem is preventing Lisp from even reading the program, you can locate it using Lisp editing commands.
  • You can look at the error and warning messages produced by the byte compiler when it compiles the program. See Compiler Errors.
  • You can use the Testcover package to perform coverage testing on the program.
  • You can use the ERT package to write regression tests for the program. See the ERT manual in ERT: Emacs Lisp Regression Testing.
  • You can profile the program to get hints about how to make it more efficient.

Other useful tools for debugging input and output problems are the dribble file (see Terminal Input) and the open-termscript function (see Terminal Output).

• Debugger  A debugger for the Emacs Lisp evaluator.
• Edebug  A source-level Emacs Lisp debugger.
• Syntax Errors  How to find syntax errors.
• Test Coverage  Ensuring you have tested all branches in your code.
• Profiling  Measuring the resources that your code uses.