#### 1.3.6 Frame Basics ¶

Frames are the boxes within which windows are displayed. StumpWM starts with a single frame per head, meaning that each monitor shows a single window, full screen. If you want to see windows side-by-side, you can “split” this frame in two, either vertically or horizontally. These frames can be further split, creating nested boxes.

Technically speaking, frames live within a “frame tree”. When you split a frame, the command actually creates two new frames side-by-side within the original parent frame. This has implications for the behaviour of many commands that interact with frames.

Within this frame tree model, all frames either contain other frames, or contain windows, or are empty. The command ‘fclear’ will hide all of a frame’s windows and show the background.