Nomenclature




The proper names for the system are listed in the manual page as X; X Window System; X Version 11; X Window System, Version 11; or X11.

The term "X-Windows" (in the manner of the subsequently released "Microsoft Windows") is not officially endorsed – with X Consortium release manager Matt Landau stating in 1993, "There is no such thing as 'X Windows' or 'X Window', despite the repeated misuse of the forms by the trade rags" – though it has been in common informal use since early in the history of X and has been used deliberately for provocative effect, for example in the Unix-Haters Handbook.

Key termsedit

The X Window System has nuanced usage of a number of terms when compared to common usage, particularly "display" and "screen", a subset of which is given here for convenience:

device
A graphics device such as a computer graphics card or a computer motherboard's integrated graphics chipset.
monitor
A physical device such as a CRT or a flat screen computer display.
screen
An area into which graphics may be rendered, either through software alone into system memory as with VNC, or within a graphics device, some of which can render into more than one screen simultaneously, either viewable simultaneously or interchangeably. Interchangeable screens are often set up to be notionally left and right from one another, flipping from one to the next as the mouse pointer reaches the edge of the monitor.
virtual screen
Two different meanings are associated with this term:
  • A technique allowing panning a monitor around a screen running at a larger resolution than the monitor is currently displaying.
  • An effect simulated by a window manager by maintaining window position information in a larger coordinate system than the screen and allowing panning by simply moving the windows in response to the user.
display
A collection of screens, often involving multiple monitors, generally configured to allow the mouse to move the pointer to any position within them. Linux-based workstations are usually capable of having multiple displays, among which the user can switch with a special keyboard combination such as control-alt-function-key, simultaneously flipping all the monitors from showing the screens of one display to the screens in another.

The term "display" should not be confused with the more specialized jargon "Zaphod display". The latter is a rare configuration allowing multiple users of a single computer to each have an independent set of display, mouse, and keyboard, as though they were using separate computers, but at a lower per-seat cost.

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