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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