foreground

n 1: the part of a scene that is near the viewer

2: (computer science) the screen area occupied by a window for

an active application

v : move into the foreground to make more visible or prominent;

"The introduction highlighted the speaker's distinguished

career in linguistics" [syn: {highlight}, {spotlight}, {play

up}] [ant: {background}, {background}]

foreground

(Unix) On a {time-sharing} system, a task executing in

foreground is one able to accept input from and return output

to the user in contrast to one running in the {background}.

Nowadays this term is primarily associated with {Unix}, but it

appears first to have been used in this sense on {OS/360}.

Normally, there is only one foreground task per terminal (or

terminal window). Having multiple processes simultaneously

reading the keyboard is confusing.

[{Jargon File}]

(1994-10-24)