Gestionari de fenèstras

The window manager is a special program responsible for drawing the borders and titlebars around windows. The window manager is responsible for handling all the operations performed on windows, such as moving, resizing, minimizing, and moving between workspaces. Windows are managed consistently with little or no work from application developers. When applications need to influence the window manager, they can provide hints on their windows using function calls in GTK+.

External programs can, however, interact directly with the window manager, and even control its behavior. Using GNOME's libwnck library, applications can get information about the placement and state of all the windows and instruct the window manager to perform various actions on those windows.

The libwnck library isn't specific to GNOME's window manager. All of its functionality uses the Extended Window Manager Hints, or EWMH. EWMH was developed jointly with freedesktop.org to provide unified window manager interaction across multiple desktops.

Window manager interaction with libwnck can be used for simple tasks, such as displaying workspace and window list applets on the user's panel, as well as for complex applications, such as performing automatic actions on new windows based on certain window properties.