Windowing system
A
windowing system is a
graphical user interface (GUI) which implements
windows as one of its primary metaphors. It is normally one part of a larger
desktop environment.
From a
programmer's point of view, a windowing system implements graphical primitives such as rendering
fonts or drawing a line on the screen, effectively providing an abstraction of the graphics hardware.
A windowing system enables the computer user to work with several programs at the same time. Each program runs in its own window, which is an area of the screen, typically a rectangle. Most windowing systems allow windows to overlap, and provide means for the user to perform standard operations such as moving/resizing a window, sending a window to the foreground/background and minimizing/maximizing a window.
Some windowing systems, like the
X Window System, have advanced capabilities such as
network transparency, allowing the user to display graphical applications running on a
remote machine. Further, the X Window System does not implement any specific policy regarding the look and feel of the graphical user interfaces, leaving that to the
X window managers,
widget toolkits and
desktop environments.
List of windowing systems
* 8½ and
rio for
Plan 9*
GEM*
Fresco/Berlin*
NEXTSTEP*
Quartz Compositor for
Mac OS X*
X Window System (free-software, de-facto standard on Linux and other Unix-like operating systems)
*
Y Window System* Some operating systems, such as
Microsoft Windows,
Mac OS (version
9 and earlier), and
Palm OS, contain a windowing system which is integrated with the OS.
*
ManaGeR (MGR)
*
Twin (Text WINdows)
* web windowing systems
**
WebWM, Web Window Manager
**
WinLIKE*
History of the graphical user interface*
Widget toolkit*
Desktop environment
