A Graphical User Interface (GUI; pronounced "gooey") is an
alternative to command-line tool use. The purpose of a GUI is to give
users an intuitive, visual interface for interacting with their
data.
CIAO contains a number of GUIs, as listed below. This file
describes those topics relevant to all the GUIs; for help
on an individual gui use "ahelp <gui name>".
| firstlook |
Provides a quick means of viewing the contents of Chandra data
and performing some simple tasks - view images, extract spectra, and
create lightcurves - taking advantage of ds9, prism, and filtwin. |
| peg |
peg is a graphical parameter editor. It allows you
to set parameters for tools and run them without
having to use command-line tools like pset and plist. |
| prism |
Provides the user with the ability to view (both numerically and
graphically) the contents of data files. |
| filtwin |
Provides graphical
access to the powerful filtering and binning capabilities afforded by the
Data Model (dm) library. |
| taskmonitor |
GUI to run a task as a background process and display the output. |
Apart from toolagent, all the GUIs support the "-help" command-line
option which lists the available options, as shown in this
example with prism:
unix% prism -help
prism, version CIAO3.0
Copyright (C) 2003 Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory
Usage: prism [FILE] [options]
Options:
-help | -h | -H : display available options
-toolmenu <file> : load the specified tool menu file
-xpa <name> : set communication access point to name
-v | -V : version info
The -toolmenu option is described in "ahelp analysis-menu".
The -xpa option allows you to change the name of the XPA access
point of the tool.
For firstlook you need to use "-info" to get the
options, which are different to those above.
Even though not listed in the help messages of the tools,
all the GUIs - including firstlook - understand the
"-iconic" option which suggests that the GUI should start up in
an "iconified" or hidden state (note that window managers
may ignore this request).
Similarly, all GUIs except firstlook have a "-nosession" option
that indicates that this instance of the GUI should not
be considered to be part of a CIAO session (see the "Sessions"
section below).
All the GUIs except for firstlook contain a
user-defineable Analysis Menu from which tools can be launched.
Whilst the CIAO distribution comes with a default setting for
the menu contents - see the text file $ASCDS_INSTALL/bin/ciao.ans -
it is easy to configure a menu tailored to your own requirements.
The menu format uses the same system as ds9, which
means you can use the same menu in ds9 and the CIAO GUIs.
See "ahelp analysis-menu" for more details.
While the GUI tools can be run individually, they can also be viewed
as an integrated analysis environment. In CIAO this is termed a "session",
and provides - amongst other things - a means for saving/restoring the
state of a particular analysis; the firstlook tool makes use of the
session concept to allow easy manipulation of the dataset in different
GUIs.
See "ahelp session" and "ahelp ciao.par" for more information.
CIAO uses the SM and ds9 packages to provide plotting and imaging
capabilities; both are provided as part of the CIAO installation
(SM is used internally by ChIPS and is not available directly).
The CIAO software may utilize a resource file to perform
user dependent configuration of the GUIs.
The configuration file contains entries for items such as
imager preference (ds9 vs saotng), dynamic vs private color
maps, application foreground and background colors, and fonts.
Since the resource file contains many X/motif related entries, it
is treated in a similar manner to X resource files. A hierarchy
exists regarding from where this file is utilized:
-
First, a user's home directory is checked for the existence of
a '.CXCdefaults' file. If a readable copy of the file is found,
it is used.
-
If the file is not found in the user's home directory, the code
then checks whether the user has set their XENVIRONMENT enviroment
variable to specify where to obtain the .CXCdefaults file - both
the path and filename must be specified, e.g.
"setenv XENVIRONMENT /pool14/my_stuff/.CXCdefaults".
-
If a .CXCdefaults file is not found in either of the previous two
locations, the $ASCDS_INSTALL/config/system directory is checked for
a .CXCdefaults file ($ASCDS_INSTALL is automatically set to the root of the
CIAO installation).
-
Finally, the $ASCDS_INSTALL/config/system directory is checked for
'CXCdefaults' (without the preceding '.'). In standard CIAO
installations, this location contains a copy of the file. If
the file does not exist here for any reason, internal defaults are used.
Depending on how a user configured the CIAO environment, there may or may
not be a local copy of the .CXCdefaults file in the home directory.
One is of course always free to copy the file into the home directory and make
customizations.
The GUIs can install private colormaps if configured to do so. This can be
used to ensure that the GUI starts with the correct color scheme or to avoid
the "flashing" that can occur when moving the mouse into/out of
the GUI window. To change the default behavior (listed below) requires
changing the CXCdefaults resource file (described above).
The resource value "*forcePrivateColormap" in the CXCdefaults
resource file controls whether or not the GUIs use a private colormap.
The value may be set to one of three values:
-
True - X gui applications always install their own colormaps
-
False - X gui applications always use the default colormap
-
dynamic - X gui applications only use a private colormap if necessary
The default value of this resource is set to dynamic. Since the use of a
private colormap will result in color flashing (the color maps will swap
in/out so that the window with pointer focus will have the correct color
scheme), the applications will use the default colormap unless they are
unable to allocate their own colors. Color intensive applications such
as netscape and the CDE window manager often consume the available cells
of the default colormap forcing the CIAO GUIs to either switch to a private
colormap or not be able to display items in the desired colors. If a user
does not want to experience color flashing, he should set the resource
*forcePrivateColormap to False (note that this may cause some data to be
unreadable if the background and text get set to similar colors).
Also note that the color scheme for the X based GUI applications is
controlled by the following CXCdefault resources:
<GUI name>*background and <GUI name>*foreground,
where <GUI name> is one of filtwin, peg, or prism.
If the
values exist in the user's CXCdefaults file, they will be used to setup
the user's color scheme (adhering to the colormap specifications outlined
above). If they do not exist, the colors of the applications will
generally be the colors specified by the '*background' and '*foreground'
resources, but this is window manager dependent. For instance, CDE will
override these values and use its own background color.
If you see the following message when running a CIAO GUI:
Warning: Value for GridType is deprecated and will be removed ...
then you need to either
update your personal copy of the CXCdefaults resource
file so that the line
*MatrixTable.gridType : XmGRID_LINE
is changed to
*MatrixTable.gridType : XmGRID_CELL_LINE
or delete the file.
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