It doesn't necessarily have to, though : look at plan9. IIRC GUIs respected UNIX's " everything is a file" philosophy, and thus were introspectible, modifiable

It doesn't necessarily have to, though : look at plan9. IIRC GUIs respected UNIX's " everything is a file" philosophy, and thus were introspectible, modifiable and scriptable from other programs. Looking at modern desktop Linux, I wish it had retained more of this. Unfortunately, d-bus, GObject and Wayland aren't really file-based.