Modifying the SAOtng GUI

Not for the faint of heart!

The SAOtng graphical user interface is written in TCL using the NOAO widget server. A copy of the GUI specification is maintained in a file named saotng.gui, available in the SAOtng bin directory. If you are familiar with TCL, you can modify this file to create a new GUI and use it as your SAOtng interface.

To load a new GUI file, use the -gui [gui file] switch on the saotng command line.

Motif vs. Athena widgets

Some sites prefer the ugly 3-D look of Motif to the elegant look of the Athena Xaw widgets. For such sites, there is a version of Xaw called Xaw3d (available from ftp.x.org) that will give the SAOtng widgets a 3-D look. To use these widgets, just uncomment the line:

  XCOMM XAWLIB = -lXaw3d # use Xaw3d for 3d look
in the SAOtng Imakefile and re-link. You might have to adjust some of the resources in saotng.gui to make it look just right.

A Note to SGI Users

The SGI implementation of X11 appears to have a bug that limits the size of the GUI file. When making a new GUI file on SGI machines, we compress the names of the variables in the file using sed before loading the GUI file. The sed input file is named wnames.sed and is located in the SAOtng source directory.


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Last Updated May 1, 1995