OSF/Motif Style Guide

OSF published the style guide alongside Motif 1.0 in 1989 and revised it for 1.1 and 1.2. It covers the look, the bevelled edges, where the menu bar goes, the fact that a dialog's buttons are OK, Apply, Cancel and Help in that order, but above all the behaviour: how Tab moves between field groups and the arrow keys within them, which mnemonics and accelerators menus must offer, and that the mouse buttons are called BSelect, BTransfer and BMenu so the same rule applies whether the mouse has two buttons or three. Much of it was aligned with IBM's CUA so that an OS/2 user would feel at home.

The final part is a certification checklist. An application that met it could call itself Motif-compliant, something Unix workstation vendors were happy to demand. That part of the guide, together with the API, became IEEE standard 1295 in 1993. It is why commercial Unix software from the 1990s all looks the same: not a failure of imagination, but a book.