A stacking window manager (also called floating window manager) is a window manager that draws all windows in a specific order, allowing them to overlap, using a technique called painter's algorithm. All window managers that allow the overlapping of windows but are not compositing window managers are considered stacking window managers, although it is possible that not all use exactly the same methodologies. Other window managers that are not considered stacking window managers are those that do not allow the overlapping of windows. These are called tiling window managers.
Stacking window managers allow windows to overlap by drawing them one at a time. Stacking, or repainting (in reference to painter's algorithm) refers to the rendering of each window as an image, painted directly over the desktop, and over any other windows that might already have been drawn, effectively erasing the areas that are covered. The process usually starts with the desktop, and proceeds by drawing each window and any child windows from back to front, until finally the foreground window is drawn.
The order in which windows are to be stacked is called their z-order.
Read more about Stacking Window Manager: Limitations, X Window System, Microsoft Windows, History
Famous quotes containing the words stacking, window and/or manager:
“The Universal Soul, as it is called, has an interest in the stacking of hay, the foddering of cattle, and the draining of peat-meadows.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Then is what you see through this window onto the world so lovely that you have no desire whatsoever to look out through any other window?—and that you even make an attempt to prevent others from doing so?”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“I knew a gentleman who was so good a manager of his time that he would not even lose that small portion of it which the calls of nature obliged him to pass in the necessary-house, but gradually went through all the Latin poets in those moments. He bought, for example, a common edition of Horace, of which he tore off gradually a couple of pages, read them first, and then sent them down as a sacrifice to Cloacina: this was so much time fairly gained.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)