KWin is a

window manager A window manager is system software that controls the placement and appearance of windows within a windowing system in a graphical user interface. Most window managers are designed to help provide a desktop environment. They work in conjunction ...

for the

X Window System The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems. X provides the basic framework for a GUI environment: drawing and moving windows on the display device and interacting wit ...

and a

Wayland compositor Wayland is a communication protocol that specifies the communication between a display server and its clients, as well as a C library implementation of that protocol. A display server using the Wayland protocol is called a ''Wayland compositor' ...

. It is released as a part of

KDE Plasma 5 KDE Plasma 5 is the fifth and current generation of the graphical workspaces environment created by KDE primarily for Linux systems. KDE Plasma 5 is the successor of KDE Plasma 4 and was first released on 15 July 2014. It includes a new default ...

, for which it is the default window manager. KWin can also be used on its own or with other

desktop environment In computing, a desktop environment (DE) is an implementation of the desktop metaphor made of a bundle of programs running on top of a computer operating system that share a common graphical user interface (GUI), sometimes described as a graphica ...

s. KWin can be configured by scripting using

QML QML (Qt Modeling Language) is a user interface markup language. It is a declarative language (similar to CSS and JSON) for designing user interface–centric applications. Inline JavaScript code handles imperative aspects. It is associated wi ...

QtScript QtScript is a scripting engine that has been part of the Qt (framework), Qt cross-platform application framework since version 4.3.0. The scripting language is based on the ECMAScript standard with a few extensions, such as QObject-style signal a ...

, both of which are based on

ECMAScript ECMAScript (; ES) is a JavaScript standard intended to ensure the interoperability of web pages across different browsers. It is standardized by Ecma International in the documenECMA-262 ECMAScript is commonly used for client-side scripting o ...

History

Look and feel

There are many

window decoration In computing, a window is a graphical control element. 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. It usually has a rectangular shape that can ove ...

s for KWin, including the current default Breeze (shown below), the previous default Oxygen,

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

-like Redmond, and Keramik. KWin Breeze window decoration

Compositing

Currently available compositing backends include OpenGL 1.2, OpenGL 2.0, OpenGL 3.1 and OpenGL ES 2.0.

Included effects

As of KDE 4.3 the following effects are built-in:

Accessibility

Appearance

Candy

Focus

Tools

Window management

References

External links

KWin release notes for KDE4.0

Decorations for KWin 4
{{X desktop environments and window managers Compositing window managers Free X window managers KDE Software Compilation Linux windowing system-related software Wayland compositors X window managers extensible by scripting