1.4 Running pyFormex

To run pyFormex, simply enter the command pyformex in a terminal window. This will start the pyFormex Graphical User Interface (GUI), from where you can launch examples or load, edit and run your own pyFormex scripts.

The installation procedure may have installed pyFormex into your desktop menu or even have created a start button in the desktop panel. These provide convenient shortcuts to start the pyFormex GUI by the click of a mouse button.

The pyFormex program takes some optional command line arguments, that modify the behaviour of the program. Appendix  gives a full list of all options. For normal use however you will seldom need to use any of them. Therefore, we will only explain here the more commonly used ones.

By default, pyFormex sends diagnostical and informational messages to the terminal from which the program was started. Sometimes this may be inconvenient, e.g. because the user has no access to the starting terminal. You can redirect these messages to the message window of the pyFormex GUI by starting pyformex with the commandpyformex -redirect. The desktop starters installed by the pyFormex installation procedure use this option.

In some cases the user may want to use the mathematical power of pyFormex without the GUI. This is e.g. useful to run complex automated procedures from a script file. For convenience, pyFormex will automatically enter this batch mode (without GUI) if the name of a script file was specified on the command line; when a script file name is absent, pyFormex start in GUI mode. Even when specifying a script file, You can still force the GUI mode by adding the option -gui to the command line.