[GRASSLIST:1118] Re: Newbie GRASS questions

[Glynn Clements]

Bill Dickinson Jr wrote:

> Well, now that I have GRASS running on my OS X box and I am running 
> through the SEEDS tutorial, I am going to start plaguing this mailing 
> list with my pithy comments and observations on GRASS. ;-) Feel free 
> to ignore them or berate me if they are too much. I'll try not to 
> bombard the list with useless fluff. ;-)
> 
> The first thing I have run into is the way certain functions work 
> through the text or the graphical interface. When I run g.list from 
> the text interface I get the appropriate list of items within the 
> Location, but then I can't get out of the list when it is done. I get 
> an (END) at the bottom of the screen, but hitting Enter does not 
> return me to my GRASS prompt. I have to go to another terminal window 
> and kill the g.list process.

Pressing "q" will probably work.

Commands which may generate a significant amount of text typically
pipe their output through a pager. The default pager is "more" if
/bin/more exists, and "less" otherwise. If your terminal (e.g. xterm)
has an adequately-sized scroll-back buffer, you might wish to skip the
use of a pager with:

For a Bourne shell:

	GRASS_PAGER=cat
	export GRASS_PAGER

For a C shell:

	setenv GRASS_PAGER cat

> Someone mentioned that the GUI was pretty rough, but so far it seems 
> fine to me. At least that is to say that it is about what I expected 
> from an open-source project without the deep pockets of an ESRI to 
> give it a slick finish.

It's rough in the sense that it's basically just a menu and some
automatically generated dialogs. The overall design is
command-centred, rather than the data-centred approach which "real"
GUI programs use.

For display purposes, there is also "d.dm". This seems like a better
concept overall, but it's fairly limited in what it can do at present.

> I believe I read somewhere that you do need a database working with 
> GRASS for Vector support, which seems pretty important coming form 
> the primarily vector world of ArcView.

This isn't the case in 5.0; it's entirely usable without an RDBMS.

OTOH, the experimental "5.1" version does make extensive use of
database functionality for vectors.

-- 
Glynn Clements <glynn.clements at virgin.net>