AE.5.2 Miscellaneous Variables

These variables are used only on particular configurations:

COMSPEC

On MS-DOS and MS-Windows, the name of the command interpreter to use when invoking batch files and commands internal to the shell. On MS-DOS this is also used to make a default value for the SHELL environment variable.

NAME

On MS-DOS, this variable defaults to the value of the USER variable.

TEMP

TMP

On MS-DOS and MS-Windows, these specify the name of the directory for storing temporary files in.

EMACSTEST

On MS-DOS, this specifies a file to use to log the operation of the internal terminal emulator. This feature is useful for submitting bug reports.

EMACSCOLORS

On MS-DOS, this specifies the screen colors. It is useful to set them this way, since otherwise Emacs would display the default colors momentarily when it starts up.

The value of this variable should be the two-character encoding of the foreground (the first character) and the background (the second character) colors of the default face. Each character should be the hexadecimal code for the desired color on a standard PC text-mode display. For example, to get blue text on a light gray background, specify `EMACSCOLORS=17', since 1 is the code of the blue color and 7 is the code of the light gray color.

The PC display usually supports only eight background colors. However, Emacs switches the DOS display to a mode where all 16 colors can be used for the background, so all four bits of the background color are actually used.

WINDOW_GFX

Used when initializing the Sun windows system.