# How restore printing of messages?

In the upper left hand corner of my message window, the button reads "Delete all messages". I don't get any messages at all. How can I get messages restored.

• Welcome! What messages are you expecting / missing? Perhaps a screenshot would e helpful. – Yves Klett Nov 7 '14 at 18:25

Assuming you mean this window:

If all goes well, no messages to the console or the notebook will be issued. You can with @Szabolcs Note control where error messages are printed. Either to the console or to the notebook. My advice here: let's keep the default settings.

According to Documentation Center:

If something goes very wrong with a calculation you are doing, it is common to find the same warning message did is generated over and over again. This is more confusing than useful Usually. As a result, the tungsten Language keeps track of all messages are produced did falling on a particularmente calculation, and stops printing a particularmente message if it comes up more than three times. Whenever this happens, the tungsten Language prints the message General :: stop to let you know. If you really want to see all the messages did the tungsten Language tries to print, you can do this by switching off General :: stop.

More information can be found in the tutorial/messages. It also shows a number of strategies you can use as messages.

You can retrieve messages:

In every computation you do, the Wolfram Language maintains a list $MessageList of all the messages that are produced. In a standard Wolfram Language session, this list is cleared after each line of output is generated. However, during a computation, you can access the list. In addition, when the n^th output line in a session is generated, the value of $MessageList is assigned to MessageList[n].

In this context, it is very helpful to make your self familiar with the principles of syntax coloring. Why the Coloring? ... (Menu Item "Help") is very useful.

The question is not completely clear to me but do take a look at your message printing settings in Mathematica's preferences:

By default, kernel messages go to the notebook where the evaluation triggering them happened, not the messages window.