However, this was so far ahead of its time that its design paradigm would not become widely adopted until more than a decade later. It used a stacking window manager that allowed overlapping windows. In 1973, the Xerox Alto became the first computer shipped with a working WIMP GUI. Main article: History of the graphical user interface Many window managers also come with various utilities and features such as task bars, program launchers, docks to facilitate halving or quartering windows on screen, workspaces for grouping windows, desktop icons, wallpaper, an ability to keep select windows in foreground, the ability to 'roll up' windows to show only their title bars, to cascade windows, to stack windows into a grid, to group windows of the same program in the task bar in order to save space, and optional multi-row taskbars.

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. In practice, the elements of this functionality vary greatly. Every graphical user interface based on a windows metaphor has some form of window management. 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.įew window managers are designed with a clear distinction between the windowing system and the window manager.

Most window managers are designed to help provide a desktop environment.

Under Wayland clients always draw their own window decorations.Ī window manager is system software that controls the placement and appearance of windows within a windowing system in a graphical user interface.

Under X11, when the window manager is not running, the window decorations are missing for most windows.

Window manager in android