[GRASS-user] grass70 and display monitor

[Jan Hartmann]

I very much agree with Markus. The main point is that a command line 
interface is *much* faster than a GUI, once you have learned to use it. 
This can take a long time to learn (take the VIM editor for example), 
and for most people that is simply not worth it. When  you "have it in 
your fingers" however, it really is much more efficient. I still use 
Grass54 for digitizing, even if I have to convert the vector maps into 
the new format, because digitizing, the most labour-intensive job there 
is in GIS, gets done much more efficiently with the left hand using the 
keyboard, and the right hand using the mouse. That program has 
disappeared, but Markus's example illustrates perfectly the case for the 
actual version of GRASS.
 
I understand that programmers  have limited time and resources, and I 
certainly agree that these should be spent on the GUI: it's important 
for many more people than the bunch of old-hand command line hackers. I 
*would* plead however to leave as much of the old functionality in place 
as possible. If I understand Glynn's posting on this subject correctly 
however, this will be very difficult, as the Vask library has been 
removed (why?), and all mouse interaction has been dropped from the 
display commands.

If that is too much trouble, I would be perfectly happy to use older 
versions of GRASS for dedicated purposes, provided I could use the same 
mapsets. Copying and converting  maps between different versions if the 
program is a major source of errors, some of them very insidious. Would 
that be an alternative for retaining old functionality: reading directly 
from old-style databases?

Jan

Markus Neteler wrote:
> 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
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>
>   
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