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3.2 The CLI GUI

On all supported platforms, you can start Msc-generator in the command line with the --gui switch. This opens a GUI, where you can work with charts. Most of the GUI is quite straightforward, here we just list a few things you may not discover by yourself at first.

MscGen-CL-GUI
MscGen-CL-GUI-Settings

There are also a few settings to tweak.

You can use the following command-line switches alongside --gui.

-S <chart type>

Adding this will skip the welcome screen and start the GUI with a fresh copy of the specified chart. If you also specify a filename, then here you can force its type.

<input filename>

The file specified will be opened. Its chart type will be deduced from its extension or its content if it is a PNG file containing a chart (saved by Msc-generator).

--nodesigns

This will skip loading the design libraries as usual.

Some other switches will abort (such as --utf16 to force a UTF-16 encoded input), because the GUI does not support them, but some switches will just be silently ignored (such as -q for quiet output).

The GUI has a settings file .msc-generator-ini, which stores window positions, settings, the recently opened file list and the autosave. On Linux and the Mac it is placed into $HOME/.msc-genrc by default or to $MSC_GEN_RC/.msc-genrc, if MSC_GEN_RC is set. On Windows it is in the AppData\Roaming\Msc-generator folder. You can freely delete this file to erase settings and history.

Finally, the command-line GUI has an example store similar to the other GUI (See Example Library). Selecting Examples from the menu bar opens a dialog box with example snippets demonstrating the features of each language.

MscGen-CL-GUI-Examples

The examples are keyword searchable, just start typing the topic you have in mind to narrow the list of examples. You can then copy and paste chart text from the exampes to your chart. In addition, the examples are editable allowing you to experiment with the language there and then. (Hinting with Ctrl+Space works, too.) Any changes made are immediately visible in the chart on the right. The examples are reset to their original text each time you exit Msc-generator.


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