In database terminology, an atomic change is an indivisible change—it can succeed entirely or it can fail entirely, but it cannot partly succeed. A Lisp program can make a series of changes to one or several buffers as an atomic change group, meaning that either the entire series of changes will be installed in their buffers or, in case of an error, none of them will be.
To do this for one buffer, the one already current, simply write a
call to atomic-change-group
around the code that makes the
changes, like this:
(atomic-change-group (insert foo) (delete-region x y))
If an error (or other nonlocal exit) occurs inside the body of
atomic-change-group
, it unmakes all the changes in that buffer
that were during the execution of the body. This kind of change group
has no effect on any other buffers—any such changes remain.
If you need something more sophisticated, such as to make changes in
various buffers constitute one atomic group, you must directly call
lower-level functions that atomic-change-group
uses.
This function sets up a change group for buffer buffer, which defaults to the current buffer. It returns a handle that represents the change group. You must use this handle to activate the change group and subsequently to finish it.
To use the change group, you must activate it. You must do this before making any changes in the text of buffer.
This function activates the change group that handle designates.
After you activate the change group, any changes you make in that buffer become part of it. Once you have made all the desired changes in the buffer, you must finish the change group. There are two ways to do this: you can either accept (and finalize) all the changes, or cancel them all.
This function accepts all the changes in the change group specified by handle, making them final.
This function cancels and undoes all the changes in the change group specified by handle.
You can cause some or all of the changes in a change group to be
considered as a single unit for the purposes of the undo
commands (see Undo) by using undo-amalgamate-change-group
.
Amalgamate all the changes made in the change-group since the state
identified by handle. This function removes all undo boundaries
between undo records of changes since the state described by
handle. Usually, handle is the handle returned by
prepare-change-group
, in which case all the changes since the
beginning of the change-group are amalgamated into a single undo unit.
Your code should use unwind-protect
to make sure the group is
always finished. The call to activate-change-group
should be
inside the unwind-protect
, in case the user types C-g
just after it runs. (This is one reason why
prepare-change-group
and activate-change-group
are
separate functions, because normally you would call
prepare-change-group
before the start of that
unwind-protect
.) Once you finish the group, don’t use the
handle again—in particular, don’t try to finish the same group
twice.
To make a multibuffer change group, call prepare-change-group
once for each buffer you want to cover, then use nconc
to
combine the returned values, like this:
(nconc (prepare-change-group buffer-1) (prepare-change-group buffer-2))
You can then activate the multibuffer change group with a single call
to activate-change-group
, and finish it with a single call to
accept-change-group
or cancel-change-group
.
Nested use of several change groups for the same buffer works as you would expect. Non-nested use of change groups for the same buffer will get Emacs confused, so don’t let it happen; the first change group you start for any given buffer should be the last one finished.