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compositor

The component that takes all the individual windows and combines them into the single image shown on screen.

Each application draws into its own window buffer; the compositor collects those buffers and blends them together — handling overlap, transparency, and stacking order — to produce the final desktop image. It is the part of a window manager responsible for what you actually see. Here it lives in the window-manager component and can wear different backend personalities.

See also

  • CocoaApple's native application framework for building macOS app windows and interfaces.
  • blendingMixing a newly drawn pixel's colour with the colour already sitting in the framebuffer, instead of overwriting it.

Referenced by

Cocoa