39.4 The Echo Area

The echo area is used for displaying error messages (see Errors), for messages made with the message primitive, and for echoing keystrokes. It is not the same as the minibuffer, despite the fact that the minibuffer appears (when active) in the same place on the screen as the echo area. See The Minibuffer in The GNU Emacs Manual.

Apart from the functions documented in this section, you can print Lisp objects to the echo area by specifying t as the output stream. See Output Streams.

• Displaying Messages		Explicitly displaying text in the echo area.
• Progress		Informing user about progress of a long operation.
• Logging Messages		Echo area messages are logged for the user.
• Echo Area Customization		Controlling the echo area.