This section describes variables (see Variables) that you can change to customize how Emacs displays. Beginning users can skip it.
If the variable visible-bell is non-nil, Emacs attempts
to make the whole screen blink when it would normally make an audible bell
sound. This variable has no effect if your terminal does not have a way
to make the screen blink.
The variable echo-keystrokes controls the echoing of multi-character
keys; its value is the number of seconds of pause required to cause echoing
to start, or zero, meaning don't echo at all. The value takes effect when
there is someting to echo. See Echo Area.
The variable baud-rate holds the output
speed of the terminal. Setting this variable does not change the
speed of actual data transmission, but the value is used for
calculations. On text-only terminals, it affects padding, and
decisions about whether to scroll part of the screen or redraw it
instead. It also affects the behavior of incremental search. On
graphical displays, baud-rate is only used to determine how
frequently to look for pending input during display updating. A
higher value of baud-rate means that check for pending input
will be done less frequently.
On graphical displays, Emacs displays the mouse pointer as an
hourglass if Emacs is busy. To disable this feature, set the variable
display-hourglass to nil. The variable
hourglass-delay determines the number of seconds of “busy
time” before the hourglass is shown; the default is 1.
If the mouse pointer lies inside an Emacs frame, Emacs makes it
invisible each time you type a character to insert text, to prevent it
from obscuring the text. (To be precise, the hiding occurs when you
type a “self-inserting” character. See Inserting Text.) Moving
the mouse pointer makes it visible again. To disable this feature,
set the variable make-pointer-invisible to nil.
On graphical displays, the variable underline-minimum-offset
determines the minimum distance between the baseline and underline, in
pixels, for underlined text. By default, the value is 1; increasing
it may improve the legibility of underlined text for certain fonts.
(However, Emacs will never draw the underline below the current line
area.) The variable x-underline-at-descent-line determines how
to draw underlined text. The default is nil, which means to
draw it at the baseline level of the font; if you change it to
nil, Emacs draws the underline at the same height as the font's
descent line.
The variable overline-margin specifies the vertical position
of an overline above the text, including the height of the overline
itself, in pixels; the default is 2.
On some text-only terminals, bold face and inverse video together
result in text that is hard to read. Call the function
tty-suppress-bold-inverse-default-colors with a non-nil
argument to suppress the effect of bold-face in this case.
On a text-only terminal, when you reenter Emacs after suspending, Emacs
normally clears the screen and redraws the entire display. On some
terminals with more than one page of memory, it is possible to arrange
the termcap entry so that the ‘ti’ and ‘te’ strings (output
to the terminal when Emacs is entered and exited, respectively) switch
between pages of memory so as to use one page for Emacs and another
page for other output. On such terminals, you might want to set the variable
no-redraw-on-reenter non-nil; this tells Emacs to
assume, when resumed, that the screen page it is using still contains
what Emacs last wrote there.