26.10 Setting Frame Parameters

You can specify the font and colors used for text display, and the colors for the frame borders, the cursor, and the mouse cursor, by customizing the faces default, border, cursor and mouse. See section Customizing Faces. You can also set a frame's default font through a pop-up menu. Press S-Mouse-1 to activate this menu.

These commands are available for controlling the window management behavior of the selected frame.

M-x auto-raise-mode

Toggle whether or not the selected frame should auto-raise. Auto-raise means that every time you move the mouse onto the frame, it raises the frame.

Some window managers also implement auto-raise. If you enable auto-raise for Emacs frames in your window manager, it will work, but it is beyond Emacs' control, so auto-raise-mode has no effect on it.

M-x auto-lower-mode

Toggle whether or not the selected frame should auto-lower. Auto-lower means that every time you move the mouse off the frame, the frame moves to the bottom of the stack on the screen.

The command auto-lower-mode has no effect on auto-lower implemented by the window manager. To control that, you must use the appropriate window manager features.

In Emacs versions that use an X toolkit, the color-setting and font-setting functions don't affect menus and the menu bar, since they are displayed by their own widget classes. To change the appearance of the menus and menu bar, you must use X resources (see section X Resources). See section Window Color Options, regarding colors. See section Font Specification Options, regarding choice of font.

Colors, fonts, and other attributes of the frame's display can also be customized by setting frame parameters in the variable default-frame-alist (see section Creating Frames). For a detailed description of frame parameters and customization, see (elisp)Frame Parameters section `Frame Parameters' in The Emacs Lisp Reference Manual.