The working area of a single document interface holds only one main object. Around the working area, within the bounding window, there may be other smaller window areas, sometimes called panes or panels, showing relevant information or options. In the working area, the document, image, folder contents or other main object is displayed. Windows usually include other graphical objects, possibly including a menu-bar, toolbars, controls, icons and often a working area. In a modern full-featured windowing system they can be resized, moved, hidden, restored or closed. Windows are two dimensional objects arranged on a plane called the desktop metaphor. Some speculate that this gave them access to Apple's OS before it was released and thus influenced the design of the windowing system in what would eventually be called Microsoft Windows. Microsoft was developing Office applications for the Mac at that time. It was first used on Apple's Lisa and later Macintosh computers. Apple developed an interface based on PARC's interface. ĭuring the 1980s the term ' WIMP', which stands for window, icon, menu, pointer, was coined at PARC.Īpple had worked with PARC briefly at that time. Research continued at Xerox Corporation's Palo Alto Research Center / PARC (led by Alan Kay).

Their earliest systems supported multiple windows, but there was no obvious way to indicate boundaries between them (such as window borders, title bars, etc.). The idea was developed at the Stanford Research Institute (led by Douglas Engelbart). Each grey-bordered area is a separate window showing a different file. Text windows are usually controlled by keyboard, though some also respond to the mouse.Ī graphical user interface (GUI) using windows as one of its main ' metaphors' is called a windowing system, whose main components are the display server and the window manager.Įxample of windows on a text-only display. Text-only displays can also support windowing, as a way to maintain multiple independent display areas, such as multiple buffers in Emacs.

Windows are primarily associated with graphical displays, where they can be manipulated with a pointer by employing some kind of pointing device. It displays the output of and may allow input to one or more processes. It usually has a rectangular shape that can overlap with the area of other windows. It consists of a visual area containing some of the graphical user interface of the program it belongs to and is framed by a window decoration. In computing, a window is a graphical control element. For other uses, see Window (disambiguation). For the Microsoft operating system, see Microsoft Windows. This article is about the graphical display of the functions of a computer.

Where is my title bar