X session manager

For this to work, the session manager program stores the names of applications that are running at logout and starts them again at login.

Moreover, for the state of the applications to be restored as well (which is needed to restore the content of windows), the applications must be able to save their state of execution upon request from the session manager and load it back when started again.

It is also possible to save a number of different sessions and loading one of them at user's choice.

As a result, the user has the possibility of saving a set of different sessions, either by storing the state of execution of the currently running applications or by explicitly listing the applications that compose a session.

How the session manager is located on the network is system-dependent: in a POSIX system, the environment contains a variable SESSION_MANAGER.

For this reason, the session manager chooses a unique identifier for each instance of each application.

The main parts of the protocol of session management are: The last point is possible because the session manager maintains a set of properties for every client (in the X Window System terminology, a property is simply a container for data).

This way, if the mail client is closed and then restarted again, it can restore the state of the text editor.

[citation needed] The X Window System includes a default session manager called xsm.

ksmserver is a default session manager of KDE Plasma 5 Desktop environment.

[6] It was eventually decided to combine both interfaces and provide an adapter (client) for legacy applications.