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29.10 Visibility of Frames

A window frame may be visible, invisible, or iconified. If it is visible, you can see its contents. If it is iconified, the frame's contents do not appear on the screen, but an icon does. 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.

— Command: make-frame-invisible &optional frame

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

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