Two of the new experimental editions are equipped with unsurprising desktop environments: LXDE and E17 (Enlightenment). Sabayon Linux, the easy-to-use Linux distribution built on top of Gentoo Linux, recently announced three new experimental editions that supplement their previous GNOME, KDE, Xfce, and Core releases. themselves, so again, any particular window could choose to not act like the other windows.ĭefWindowProc is implemented in user32.dll - so really that is the window manager.This article was contributed by Koen Vervloesem The taskbar - provided by explorer - provides buttons to manipulate windows but ultimately (a) Its just a regular window itself, and (b) It sends messages to the windows to get them to maximize, minimize, restore etc. DefWindowProc handles the clicks in the non client areas of the windows to perform the tasks typical of window managers - sizing, moving, maximizing and so on.īecause all window's WindowProcs get to choose how to handle messages, they can choose to not implement the typical window manager behaviors by handling the message them self and not calling DefWindowProc.

The appearance of a window manager however is an emergent property in Microsoft Windows: All windows have a WindowProc that handles messages - and all messages not handled by the application code must get passed to a function called DefWindowProc.

The windowing system is responsible for drawing the windows, and 'the shell' - typically explorer - is responsible for displaying a task bar and any icons on the desktop. In the sense of the linked article, Windows does not have a discrete window manager.

Tiling manager for windows