The Y Window System (also known as Y-Windows) is a windowing system, consisting of a window server and a client library for writing applications. It was written by Mark Thomas as the subject of his Master's thesis at Imperial College, London. It is intended to be a successor to the X Window System, hence the name. It differs from the X Window System in having an integrated widget set and ground-up support for things like an alpha channel, which allows transparent or translucent windows.
At the end of his Master's Thesis, Thomas had a working system with some applications. Later he released the code and set up a community project. Y uses SDL, and in theory can run under any system that supports SDL.
As of 2005, the project is incomplete and not undergoing active development; the developers do not have time to work on this project.
As of 2010, the project has been forked, and XGL and Cairo support added. However, support for SDL and fbdev has been removed. The development seems to have stalled as well since the end of 2006.
A much earlier usage of the term "Y Window System" was made by Philip Taylor of Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, University of London, in an April Fools' Day spoof submitted to the LaTeX-L mailing list on April 1, 1992; a copy of the article appears as the fourth message in an archive stored on the Department of Mathematics web site at the University of Utah.
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