# Overview

The IDA user interface is your primary workspace for reverse engineering. It's designed to be highly flexible: IDA lets you arrange, show, and hide different panels and windows to match your workflow and the complexity of the binary you're analyzing.

## **Main UI Elements**

### **Subviews**

Subviews are the individual windows/views that make up your workspace. Each subview surfaces a different aspect of the binary: the disassembly listing, hex data, function lists, call graphs, and more.

### Menu Bar

The Top Level Menu Bar is the entry point for all of IDA's actions. The list of available actions is mostly context-specific and depends on your cursor position, etc.

### Desktops

Desktops are saved layouts of your entire workspace. They let you quickly switch between different arrangements of IDA’s windows depending on what task you’re doing. You can create multiple desktops for different tasks and switch between them anytime.

**See also**

* [Basic Usage Part 2: UI overview](/getting-started/basic-usage.md#part-2-ui-overview)

## Beyond the Visual Interface

The visual user interface is the most common way to use IDA, but not the only one. If you prefer working without launching the full application, IDA also supports `idat` (a text-mode interface) and a headless mode for scripted or automated workflows.

**See also**

* [idalib](/core/idalib/overview.md) - Meet Headless IDA


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