A window manager is system software that controls the placement and appearance of windows within a windowing system in a graphical user interface. Most window managers are designed to help provide a desktop environment. They work in conjunction with the underlying graphical system that provides required functionality—support for graphics hardware, pointing devices, and a keyboard, and are often written and created using a widget toolkit.
Few window managers are designed with a clear distinction between the windowing system and the window manager. Every graphical user interface based on a windows metaphor has some form of window management. In practice, the elements of this functionality vary greatly. Elements usually associated with window managers allow the user to open, close, minimize, maximize, move, resize, and keep track of running windows, including window decorators. Many window managers also come with various utilities and features: e.g. docks, task bars, program launchers, desktop icons, and wallpaper.
Read more about Window Manager: X Window Managers, Microsoft Windows, Types of Window Managers, Features and Facilities of Window Managers, History
Famous quotes containing the words window and/or manager:
“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 (18441900)
“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 (16941773)