For those that don’t know. Emacs was there before windows managers was the norm (I think), so after splitting the emacs view, each part was called a window.

The whole view is called a frame and store the window layout. You can create as many frames as you, each with its own layout and in terminal mode, they would swap like i3 workspaces. But in graphic mode (GUI) they are what we call window today, what emacs users refer as windows would be panes.

It operates on frames, moving the windows inside them, similar to how transposing a matrix moves around the values it contains.