Haiku's GUI
-Haiku's graphical user interface is an integral part of the system. Unlike unix-based operating systems, there's no separate window manager and booting just into a command line shell is not possible. Haiku's focus being on the desktop user, this is just not considered necessary. +
Haiku's graphical user interface is an integral part of the system. Unlike Unix-based operating systems, there's no separate window manager and booting just into a command line shell is not possible. Haiku's focus being on the desktop user, this is just not considered necessary.
As you probably have experience with other graphical environments, let's skip over the standards like menus, right-click context menus, drag&drop etc. Let's have a look at the few unique aspects of Haiku's GUI instead.
Before we start with that, there's one more thing you'll probably run into quite quickly: By default, Haiku's option key, to invoke commands from menus for example, is not the usual CTRL key, but ALT instead. This has historical reasons, because the BeOS was inspired somewhat by MacOS. After you get used to it, it actually feels better as e.g. ALT+C and ALT+V is reached more conveniently on the keyboard and these commands seemlessly integrate into the bash shell of the Terminal.