4 Display Settings

4.1 Emacs in console mode goes beyond the window size

The variable w32-use-full-screen-buffer controls whether Emacs uses the window size or buffer size to determine the number of lines on screen. Normally the window size is correct, but when running Emacs over some telnet servers, the buffer size needs to be used. Emacs tries to guess the correct value at startup, but if it guesses wrong, you can customize that variable yourself.

4.2 What do I do if I have problems with my mouse buttons?

Emacs assigns bindings assuming a three button mouse. On Windows, if a two button mouse is detected, a hack is enabled which lets you simulate the third button by pressing both mouse buttons simultaneously. w32-mouse-button-tolerance defines the timeout for what is considered “simultaneous”. You can check how many buttons Emacs thinks your mouse has with C-h v w32-num-mouse-buttons.

If you find yourself needing the mouse-3 bindings more often than mouse-2, you can swap the buttons with the following code in your init file:

     (setq w32-swap-mouse-buttons t)

4.3 How do I cut and paste text with NUL characters?

If you attempt to cut and paste text with NUL characters embedded in it, then the text will be truncated at the first NUL character. This is a limitation of the Windows clipboard, and does not affect killing and yanking from the kill-ring within Emacs.

4.4 How can I fix garbled text yanked from the clipboard?

You can try set-selection-coding-system, but generally such corruption is a thing of the past, as Emacs uses Unicode for the clipboard by default now.

4.5 How do I change the sound of the Emacs beep?

You can use the function set-message-beep to change the sound that Emacs uses for its beep. This affects both console and GUI frames. The doc string contains a list of the system sounds you can use.