Emacs/emacs/MS 002dWindows-Registry
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C.4.3 The MS-Windows System Registry
On MS-Windows, the installation program addpm.exe
adds
values for emacs_dir
, EMACSLOADPATH
, EMACSDATA
,
EMACSPATH
, EMACSDOC
, SHELL
and TERM
to the
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
section of the system registry, under
/Software/GNU/Emacs
. It does this because there is no standard
place to set environment variables across different versions of
Windows. Running addpm.exe
is no longer strictly necessary
in recent versions of Emacs, but if you are upgrading from an older
version, running addpm.exe
ensures that you do not have
older registry entries from a previous installation, which may not be
compatible with the latest version of Emacs.
When Emacs starts, as well as checking the environment, it also checks
the System Registry for those variables and for HOME
, LANG
and PRELOAD_WINSOCK
.
To determine the value of those variables, Emacs goes through the
following procedure. First, the environment is checked. If the
variable is not found there, Emacs looks for registry keys by that
name under /Software/GNU/Emacs
; first in the
HKEY_CURRENT_USER
section of the registry, and if not found
there, in the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
section. Finally, if Emacs
still cannot determine the values, compiled-in defaults are used.
In addition to the environment variables above, you can also add
settings to the /Software/GNU/Emacs
registry key to specify X
resources (see X Resources). Most of the settings you can specify
in your .Xdefaults
file can be set from that registry key.