Running pyFormex

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

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

The program takes some optional command line arguments, that modify the behaviour of the program. Appendix Command line options 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, 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 GUI by starting pyformex with the command pyformex --redirect. The desktop starters installed by the installation procedure use this option.

In some cases the user may want to use the mathematical power of without the GUI. This is e.g. useful to run complex automated procedures from a script file. For convenience, 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, 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.

Command line options

The following is a complete list of the options for the pyformex command.This output can also be generated by the command pyformex --help.

Usage: pyformex [<options>] [ --  <Qapp-options> ] [[ scriptname [scriptargs]] ...]

Options:
  --gui              start the GUI (default if no scriptfile argument is
                     given)
  --nogui            do not load the GUI (default if a scriptfile argument is
                     given)
  -i, --interactive  go into interactive mode after processing the command
                     line parameters. This is implied by the --gui option.
  --force-dri        Force use of Direct Rendering
  --force-nodri      Disables the Direct Rendering
  --uselib           Use the pyFormex C lib if available. This is the default.
  --nouselib         Do not use the pyFormex C-lib.
  --safelib          Convert data types to match C-lib. This is the default.
  --unsafelib        Do not convert data types to match C-lib. BEWARE: this
                     may make the C-lib calls impossible. Use only for
                     debugging purposes.
  --fastencode       Use a fast algorithm to encode edges.
  --config=CONFIG    Use file CONFIG for settings
  --nodefaultconfig  Skip the default site and user config files. This option
                     can only be used in conjunction with the --config option.
  --redirect         Redirect standard output to the message board (ignored
                     with --nogui)
  --detect           Detect helper software and print report.
  --debug            display debugging info to sys.stdout
  --classify         classify the examples in categories
  --whereami         show where the pyformex package is located
  --remove           remove the pyformex installation
  --test             testing mode: only for developers!
  --testhighlight    highlight testing mode: only for developers!
  --executor         test alternate executor: only for developers!
  --version          show program's version number and exit
  -h, --help         show this help message and exit

Running without the GUI

If you start with the --nogui option, no Graphical User Interface is created. This is extremely useful to run automated scripts in batch mode. In this operating mode, will interprete all arguments remaining after interpreting the options, as filenames of scripts to be run (and possibly arguments to be interpreted by these scripts). Thus, if you want to run a script myscript.py in batch mode, just give the command pyformex myscript.py.

The running script has access to the remaining arguments in the global list variable argv. The script can use any arguments of it and pop them of the list. Any arguments remaining in the argv list when the script finishes, will be used for another execution cycle. This means that the first remaining argument should again be a script.