GNU Emacs Manual - Terminal Init

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### Terminal-specific Initialization

Each terminal type can have a Lisp library to be loaded into Emacs when it is run on that type of terminal. For a terminal type named termtype, the library is called ``term/termtype'` and it is found by searching the directories `load-path` as usual and trying the suffixes ``.elc'` and ``.el'`. Normally it appears in the subdirectory ``term'` of the directory where most Emacs libraries are kept.

The usual purpose of the terminal-specific library is to map the escape sequences used by the terminal's function keys onto more meaningful names, using `function-key-map`. See the file ``term/lk201.el'` for an example of how this is done. Many function keys are mapped automatically according to the information in the Termcap data base; the terminal-specific library needs to map only the function keys that Termcap does not specify.

When the terminal type contains a hyphen, only the part of the name before the first hyphen is significant in choosing the library name. Thus, terminal types ``aaa-48'` and ``aaa-30-rv'` both use the library ``term/aaa'`. The code in the library can use `(getenv "TERM")` to find the full terminal type name.

The library's name is constructed by concatenating the value of the variable `term-file-prefix` and the terminal type. Your ``.emacs'` file can prevent the loading of the terminal-specific library by setting `term-file-prefix` to `nil`.

Emacs runs the hook `term-setup-hook` at the end of initialization, after both your ``.emacs'` file and any terminal-specific library have been read in. Add hook functions to this hook if you wish to override part of any of the terminal-specific libraries and to define initializations for terminals that do not have a library. See section Hooks.

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