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G.4 Frames and Terminals

FRAME

A “frame” is a screen object that contains one or more Emacs windows. In Emacs Lisp, a “frame object” is a Lisp object that represents a frame on the screen.

A frame initially contains a single main window and/or a minibuffer window; you can subdivide the main window vertically or horizontally into smaller windows.

TERMINAL

A “terminal” is a display device capable of displaying one or more Emacs frames. In Emacs Lisp, a “terminal object” is a Lisp object that represents a terminal.There is no primitive for creating terminal objects. There are two classes of terminals:

1. “text terminals”; non-graphics-capable displays, including ‘xterm’ and other terminal emulators. On a text terminal, each Emacs frame occupies the terminal’s entire screen; although you can create additional frames and switch between them, the terminal only shows one frame at a time.
2. “graphical terminals”; are managed by graphical display systems such as the X Window System, which allow Emacs to show multiple frames simultaneously on the same display.

Each terminal object has the following ATTRIBUTES:

• name of device used by the terminal, e.g. ‘/dev/tty’
• terminal and keyboard coding systems used on the terminal
• kind of display associated with the terminal
  • x
  • t
  • w32
  • ns
  • pc
• list of terminal parameters

MULTIPLE TERMINALS

On GNU and Unix systems, you can create additional frames on any available terminal, within a single Emacs session, regardless of whether Emacs was started on a text or graphical terminal. Emacs can display on both graphical and text terminals simultaneously. This comes in handy, for instance, when you connect to the same session from several remote locations. *Note Multiple Terminals.

• Frame and Terminal Functions
• Creating Frames