![]() ![]() Several X window managers provide switching desktops. A switching desktop provides a pager for the user to switch between "contexts", or pages of screen space, only one of which can be displayed on the computer's display at any given time. They are then only accessible to the user if that particular context is enabled. ("Virtual Desktop" was originally a trademark of Solbourne Computer.) Rather than simply being placed at an x, y position on the computer's display, windows of running applications are then placed at x, y positions on a given virtual desktop “context”. Switchable desktops were introduced to a much larger audience by Tom LaStrange in swm (the Solbourne Window Manager, for the X Window System) in 1989. Switchable desktops were designed and implemented at Xerox PARC as "Rooms" by Austin Henderson and Stuart Card in 1986 and (unknowingly to the authors until their publication) was conceptually similar to earlier work by Patrick Peter Chan in 1984. Typically, scrolling/panning a subsection of the virtual desktop into view is used to navigate an oversized virtual desktop. Another approach is to expand the size of a single virtual screen beyond the size of the physical viewing device. Switchable virtual desktops allow the user to make virtual copies of their desktop view-port and switch between them, with open windows existing on single virtual desktops. ![]() There are two major approaches to expanding the virtual area of the screen. ![]() This compensates limits of the desktop area and is helpful in reducing clutter of running graphical applications. In computing, a virtual desktop is a term used with respect to user interfaces, usually within the WIMP paradigm, to describe ways in which the virtual space of a computer's desktop environment is expanded beyond the physical limits of the screen's display area through the use of software. In this example a Unix-like operating system is using the X windowing system and the Compiz cube plugin to decorate the KDE desktop environment. Virtual desktops rendered as the faces of a cube.
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