OK, so I have this cylinder that I've manipulated and now I want to make a UV map at of it. I've made UV maps before but the interface is all changed around (this was from an older version Blend file) and when I'm in UV mode and have the object selected I get nothing in the map window. If I click unwrap it does nothing except bring up an unwrap dialog with options. I have no clue wtf is going on.

Looks like your UI is changed around from the default or customized in some way,. Press SHIFT+F10 in the left panel to bring up the UV editor. You currently have the image editor active there instead. I would reset your Blender back to factory default settings.

Make sure your mouse cursor is in the left panel before pressing SHIFT + F10 to cycle into UV editor mode, Alternatively, you could go down to the lower left corner of the panel where you see that little paint bucket icon with an arrow next to it and click there to bring up your panel modes. Then manually select the UV Editor.

Thanks. Being the newb that I am at Blender I totally messed the interface up. shift+F10 got me back with the UV editor. I had suspected that what I was looking at was the image editor but wasn't sure.

^Not your fault - when I upgraded to 2.81, it also changed my uv-editor workspace to looking at the image editor instead of the uv-editor by default (and they look so similar it took me a while to figure it out lol). Thankfully, saving the new layout as default is easy to do.