Menus and toolbars

You might be interested in the menubar and icon toolbar at the top of an emacs window but personally I find the emacs menus unintuitive and the icon toolbar kind of superfluous, and use neither. Fortunately you can turn both off if you like using M-x menu-bar-mode (it's a toggle, so turn it on and off with the same command) and M-x tool-bar-mode.

To make these preferences permanent, add (tool-bar-mode -1) and (menu-bar-mode -1) to your .emacs file, respectively.