26. Frames and Graphical Displays

When using a graphical display, you can create multiple windows at the system in a single Emacs session. Each system-level window that belongs to Emacs displays a frame which can contain one or several Emacs windows. A frame initially contains a single general-purpose Emacs window which you can subdivide vertically or horizontally into smaller windows. A frame normally contains its own echo area and minibuffer, but you can make frames that don't have these—they use the echo area and minibuffer of another frame.

To avoid confusion, we reserve the word “window” for the subdivisions that Emacs implements, and never use it to refer to a frame.

Editing you do in one frame affects the other frames. For instance, if you put text in the kill ring in one frame, you can yank it in another frame. If you exit Emacs through C-x C-c in one frame, it terminates all the frames. To delete just one frame, use C-x 5 0 (that is zero, not o).

Emacs compiled for MS-DOS emulates some windowing functionality, so that you can use many of the features described in this chapter. See section Mouse Usage on MS-DOS.