[GRASS-user] grass70 and display monitor

[Markus Neteler]

On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 3:23 PM, Michael Barton <michael.barton at asu.edu> wrote:
> Roy,
>
> I guess you haven't been following quite all of this discussion.

Sincerely, I am in the same boat apparently, see below.

> You can still run all module commands in GRASS from any terminal. You can
> TYPE d* commands into the command line interface of the GUI and have the
> resulting maps displayed in the GUI display canvas. You can also type the
> d.* commands into any xterminal and have grass maps saved as graphic files
> to view. These can be viewed automatically with free image viewers (like
> d.mon did) as Glynn has shown. The old, primitive, INTERACTIVE xterminal
> behavior is all that has been dropped.

And that's the key issue here.
Personally, I need (beside d.rast/d.vect)
- d.zoom
- d.measure
- d.where

to interactively work with the maps. GRASS analysis consists in my case
of a significant amount of graphically digging in the maps.

> For interactive use, there is a much
> more sophisticated interface that exists now--that is, you can do a lot more
> interaction than you could do before.

True. But it is not yet as efficient as the old method. To better explain (and
please don't get me wrong, you have done a tremendous job with the new GUI!!,
note that I am one of these funky cmd line power users :-):
- to visualize a, say, raster map which I have been looking at 3 months ago,
 I type in bash CTRL-R and a fraction of what I remember of the name, then maybe
 another few CTRL-R to cycle to the right one. Enter and I see it.
- Using the GUI, I have to use the icon/find the menu entry, select
the map in the
  map selector (problem here, my MODIS LST time series have 5 * 1460 maps per
  mapset, that would be 7300 maps to scroll through!), then accept it
and have it
  listed in the map list. Still I don't see it because the "Render"
button isn't activated
  by default... (see my other poll about this some time ago). So, using the GUI
  here is unrealistic. Sure, I am a strange user :)

> Besides simply not being GRASS 4 or 5 (which are still available to be run),
> what functionality are you missing?

The speed of displaying maps and the ease of querying them. If there was a
command line possibility to control the wxGUI, I would most likely make
the switch to GRASS 7. Speed really matters for me. I am routinely analysing
11,000+ maps and regularly work in 3 projects in one morning, so the command
line history is a real lifesaver here to also recall what I have done
(and to eventually
morph it to a document).

The new GUI, integrated with the command line possibility to throw in the maps,
would be the perfect combination.

Markus