Windows and Frames

Some More Basic Definitions

Window: A portion of screen real-estate where the contents of a buffer may be displayed. This is not the same as a GUI window.
Frame: A GUI Window with borders. A Frame may contain many Emacs windows. A single Emacs session may support multiple frames.

Emacs Windows

Because emacs was originally written long before windowing systems were in common usage, the emacs term window means something slightly different than what the GUI generation would expect. A window (to emacs) is a portion of the emacs screen where a buffer may be visible. Multiple, tiled windows may be present on one screen.

    C-X 3       Split the current window horizontally
    C-X 2       Split the current window vertically
    C-X 1       Delete all other windows (except the current one)
    C-X 0       Delete the current window

Emacs Frames

What emacs calls frames are what most everybody else calls windows. Emacs can easily handle multiple frames (GUI windows).

Even though there are multiple frames display, a only single running copy of emacs is behind all of the frames. That means a single buffer may be display in two different frames with realtime updates in all windows.

    C-X 5 2     Create a new frame (GUI window)
    C-X 5 0     Delete the current frame (GUI Window)

Author: Jim Weirich / jweirich@one.net
Last modified: Mon Oct 4 22:44:43 EDT 1999
Network Provider: One Net Communications