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A 'windowing system' (or 'window 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.

Contents

List of windowing systems

POSIX-compatible windowing systems

Other

See also

List of windowing systems

POSIX-compatible windowing systems

★ 8½ and rio for Plan 9

★ Fresco/Berlin

★ FBUI

★ ManaGeR (MGR)

★ Metisse

★ Qtopia

★ Quartz Compositor integrated into Mac OS X

★ Twin (Text WINdows)

★ X Window System (free-software, de-facto standard on Linux and other Unix-like operating systems)

★ Xynth

★ Y Window System

Other

★ DM

★ GEM

★ Intuition

★ NeWS / XNeWS

★ NeXT DPS

★ Microwindows

★ MiniGUI
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. Windows Vista integrates the Desktop Window Manager.

Web windowing systems

★ Dojo

★ TIBCO General Interface an open source Ajax Rich Internet Application Toolkit with more than 100 components for making Ajax apps with the paradigms of a windowing system's GUI

★ WebWM, Web Window Manager

See also

★ History of the graphical user interface

★ Widget toolkit

★ Desktop environment