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The OPEN LOOK GUI is a popular user interface style (also called a “graphical user interface,” or GUI) for programs running on window systems like The X Window System. X11
itself is a network-based graphics windowing system developed at MIT and widely adopted as an industry standard. But X11 only provides the foundation and skeleton of a
window system, just as concrete and wood provide the foundation and framework for a house. The material that you put on the outside will significantly affect both how the final
edifice looks and how comfortable it will be to live and work in, be that edifice a house or a window system. One exterior, or Graphical User Interface, that became popular in the
late 1980’s and early 1990’s is OPEN LOOK. The OPEN LOOK GUI was designed by Sun and AT&T with help from Xerox, and is based in part—like other X11 GUIs such as
OSF/Motif, and other window systems such as the Apple Macintosh—on pioneering work done in the late 1960’s and 1970’s at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and other
research sites. OPEN LOOK has also been influenced by a family resemblance to SunView, Sun’s earlier, very successful, and long-popular workstation window system.

If you are new to X, you may be wondering why you should consider the OPEN LOOK GUI. First of all, OPEN LOOK has many features that make it more intuitive and easier to use
than other X-based user interfaces. For example, frequently-accessed menus can be “pinned up” for as long as you need them. As well, the graphical elements each have a distinctive
shape—a button is always oval, a pull-down menu is always shown by a small triangle, etc.—which makes it easier to spot buttons, pull-down menus, etc., than when
using a GUI that uses rectangular shapes for everything. And of course if you have previously used SunView, you will find much that is familiar in the OPEN LOOK GUI.

We describe the basic concepts of window systems and terminology, the application programs (clients) commonly included with these packages as well as some free-software
clients that you may wish to obtain on your own, and how client programs behave under OPEN LOOK. The OPEN LOOK edition is intended for those using X with the OPEN LOOK
interface. There are also Motif and “generic (MIT) X11” versions of this book available from O’Reilly & Associates.

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