Notable options include:

• Icons can be made to appear on different areas of the screen.
• The button used to open menus can be changed to the left mouse button rather than the default of the right mouse button.
• Scroll bars are configurable and can be placed on the left or right.
• By default the mouse cursor can instantly jump to popup windows, and that can be turned off.

The screen shots also shows the default behavior of clicking a menu item with the left mouse button - a default action is instantly selected instead of displaying the menu. The menu is only displayed by clicking the right mouse button instead. This method might be more familiar to users that previously used SunView. Changing the menu option in the properties makes the left mouse button display the menu as is common in most other GUIs.

Some of the OpenWindows applications.

Note that in SunView it is not possible to position a window so that part of it is off of the screen. Here it is.

An interesting feature is that some menus can be "tacked" up so they display until dismissed.

Like SunView, OpenWindows includes an e-mail program that works with the built-in Unix mail system. This also shows an example of a message dialog, which sometimes visually shows where the action originated.

OpenWindows 2 can also run SunView applications. SunView applications running this way are managed by their own windowing system instead of the OpenWindows window manager.

And a few demo applications.

There is an option to "lock" the screen from the Workspace menu. When activated it starts a screen saver that displays random curvy shapes.

Leaving the screen saver prompts for the user ID and password before returning to the desktop. .

Finally, exiting OpenWindows 2.