In This Chapter What’s a GUI — and should you care?
Finding out which type of windows you have Window-wrangling skills, Motif and otherwise Getting in and out of windows Making UNIX look and act a whole heck of a lot like Those Other Famous Operating Systems To answer your first question, GUI stands for graphical user interface and really is pronounced “gooey.” We prefer the term WIMP, which stands for windows, icons, and mouse pointing, but for some reason the term never caught on. Fast-track executives would rather be gooey than wimps, we suppose.
A GUI is a combination of a graphics screen (one that can show pictures in addition to text), a mouse (or something like it), and a system that divides the screen into several windows that can show different things at the same time. All GUIs work in more or less the same way because they’re all based on the same original work done at Xerox about 20 years ago. The details differ enough, though, to make you want to tear your hair out.