distinguish between an active window and application window?
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Answer:
An inactive window is any window that is not being used or in the background of the active window. The picture illustrates the difference between an active (text document) and inactive (web page) window
An active window is the currently focused window in the current window manager or explorer. Different window managers indicate the currently-active window in different ways and allow the user to switch between windows in different ways. For example, in Microsoft Windows, if both Notepad and Microsoft Paint are open, clicking in the Notepad window will cause that window to become active. In Windows, the active window is indicated by having a different coloured title bar. Clicking is not the only way of selecting an active window, however: some window managers (such as FVWM) make the window under the mouse pointer active—simply moving the mouse is sufficient to switch windows; a click is not needed.
Window managers often provide a way to select the active window using the keyboard as an alternative to the mouse. One typical key combination is Alt+Tab, used by Windows and KDE (by default, though this is user-configurable); another is apple-tilde, used by Macintosh. Pressing the appropriate key combination typically cycles through all visible windows in some order, though other actions are possible.
Many, though not all, window managers provide a region of the screen containing some kind of visual control (often a button) for each window on the screen. Each button typically contains the title of the window and may also contain an icon. This area of the screen generally provides some kind of visual indication of which window is active—for example, the active window's button may appear “pushed in”. It is also usually possible to switch the active window by clicking on the appropriate button. In Microsoft Windows, this area of the screen is called the taskbar; in Apple Macintosh systems this area of the screen is called the dock.