1.4 Manipulating Frames and Windows

Frames and windows are concepts borrowed from Emacs and the GNU Screen program, and should be familiar to users of those programs. Others may find the terms a little confusing. In other window managers, a “window” usually refers to a bounded box on the screen, showing output from a single program. StumpWM splits this into two concepts: the “frame” is the bounded box, the “window” is the visible output of a program.

One frame can contain many windows. As new windows are created, they appear at the top of the window-stack of the current frame. This is also a little different from other tiling window managers, many of which automatically create new frames for new windows.

Both frames and windows are ordered by when they were last focused. In the following commands and documentation, the terms “next” and “previous” refer to this order. “Other” refers to the most-recently focused object. Calling “other” commands multiple times will bounce back and forth between the two most recent objects.

By default, StumpWM starts with a single group, called “Default”, which contains one full-screen frame per head. You can split individual frames horizontally or vertically using the ‘hsplit’ and ‘vsplit’ commands, bound to “C-t S” and “C-t s” by default. When a frame is split, the next-most-recently-focused window is pulled into the new frame. See section Frames, and Windows, for a complete listing of commands.

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