When using aipsview to carry out a specific analysis of an image data set, you may wish to stop your session and come back to it later at the same state. Detailed information about the value of many toggles and text fields that have been edited throughout a session is kept by aipsview. These values can be saved in a global configuration file; thus, most of the state of a session can easily be recovered. Additionally, configuration files specific to each data set can also be saved. For example, one astronomer could interactively use aipsview to create a PostScript file for publication, including a raster image, contours, marker symbols, and customized text labels. The state of aipsview for that data set could be saved to a image-specific configuration file; the configuration file and data set and could be transferred to another collaborator (who has access to aipsview), who can recover the same state of the program in order to make minor changes to the output PostScript file. The components of the program that can be saved into configuration files include the four setup panels (chosen from the Edit menu of the Display window).
To save current global settings, choose Update ~/.aipsviewrc, from the File menu of the AIPS View window, see Section 2.1.1. To save the file-specific settings, choose Update file's rc from the File menu of the Display window, see Section 2.3.1.
To obtain a list of all the global configuration options that aipsview currently can use, choose the Create aipsviewrc.list option of the File menu of the AIPS View window, see Section 2.1.1. To write out a list of all file-specific configuration options, choose Create filerc.list from the File menu of the Display window, see Section 2.3.1. Note that options pertaining to a particular module are only written if the module has been opened (e.g., no profile setup configuration options are written unless the Profile Setup window is first opened).
When aipsview updates a configuration file, the previous file is given the extension .bak. When looking for a configuration parameter, aipsview first checks those set in the data specific configuration file, then the global file.
When looking for a data file specific options file, aipsview looks first in the current directory, then in the directory of the data file. It always writes data specific files to the current directory; .aipsviewrc files are written to the home directory (n.b., the current implementation never looks in the data file's directory).
An example configuration file is shown in Appendix A.1.4. Note that comments can be placed in the configuration file by preceding them with a ``#'' symbol. General notes on configuration files: