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29.11 Visibility of Frames

A window frame may be visible, invisible, or iconified. If it is visible, you can see its contents, unless other windows cover it. If it is iconified, the frame's contents do not appear on the screen, but an icon does. (Note: because of the way in which some window managers implement the concept of multiple workspaces, or desktops, all frames on other workspaces may appear to Emacs to be iconified.) If the frame is invisible, it doesn't show on the screen, not even as an icon.

Visibility is meaningless for terminal frames, since only the selected one is actually displayed in any case.

— Command: make-frame-visible &optional frame

This function makes frame frame visible. If you omit frame, it makes the selected frame visible. This does not raise the frame, but you can do that with raise-frame if you wish (see Raising and Lowering).

— Command: make-frame-invisible &optional frame force

This function makes frame frame invisible. If you omit frame, it makes the selected frame invisible.

Unless force is non-nil, this function refuses to make frame invisible if all other frames are invisible..

— Command: iconify-frame &optional frame

This function iconifies frame frame. If you omit frame, it iconifies the selected frame.

— Function: frame-visible-p frame

This returns the visibility status of frame frame. The value is t if frame is visible, nil if it is invisible, and icon if it is iconified.

On a text-only terminal, all frames are considered visible, whether they are currently being displayed or not, and this function returns t for all frames.

The visibility status of a frame is also available as a frame parameter. You can read or change it as such. See Management Parameters.

The user can iconify and deiconify frames with the window manager. This happens below the level at which Emacs can exert any control, but Emacs does provide events that you can use to keep track of such changes. See Misc Events.