KWin is a

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

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 originated as part of Project Athena at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1984. The X protocol has been at ...

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 composito ...

. It is released as a part of

KDE Plasma KDE Plasma is a Shell (computing), graphical shell developed by the KDE community for Unix-like operating systems. It serves as the interface layer between the user and the operating system, providing a graphical user interface (GUI) and workspa ...

, 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 graphi ...

s. KWin can be configured by scripting using QML or

QtScript QtScript is a scripting engine that has been part of the Qt cross-platform application framework since version 4.3.0. It was first deprecated as of Qt 5.5, then dropped as of Qt 6.5, and replaced by Qt Meta-object Language ( QML). The scripting l ...

, both of which are based on

ECMAScript ECMAScript (; ES) is a standard for scripting languages, including JavaScript, JScript, and ActionScript. It is best known as a JavaScript standard intended to ensure the interoperability of web pages across different web browsers. It is stan ...

History

Look and feel

There are many window decorations for KWin, including the current default Breeze (shown below), the previous default Oxygen,

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

-like Redmond, and Keramik. KWin Breeze window decoration

Compositing

Currently available compositing backends include

OpenGL OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a Language-independent specification, cross-language, cross-platform application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D computer graphics, 2D and 3D computer graphics, 3D vector graphics. The API is typic ...

1.2, OpenGL 2.0, OpenGL 3.1 and

OpenGL ES OpenGL for Embedded Systems (OpenGL ES or GLES) is a subset of the OpenGL computer graphics rendering application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D and 3D computer graphics such as those used by video games, typically hardware-accelerate ...

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