Using the rdbgui4sasa GUI

In order to perform interactive simulations, the easiest is to invoke rdbgui4sasa. Its basic use is explained in the Interactive Simulations Section of the sasa documentation

Its use is meant to be self-explanatory. A few things to know still:

  1. All buttons have tooltips that you can read by flying over with the mouse pointer long enough.
  2. Some buttons have shortcuts that you can get via the [Alt] key: as long as [Alt] is pressed, all the buttons with shortcut have underlined letter. For example, the Step button has its p underlined; this means that [Alt+p] will trigger the Step button.
  3. At each click, the corresponding raw rdbg command is displayed in the terminal you have invoked rdbgui4sasa from.
  4. You can still use the rdbg toplevel loop to interact with the simulation in the terminal you’ve launched rdbgui4sasa in. It can be useful to use commands that do not have buttons.
cd test/unison
make grid10.rdbgui

If you click on the [graph] button, a pdf file representing the current configuration is popped-up (enabled nodes are in green, and the enabling action label is shown). This file will be re-generated each time the configuration changes, e.g., after a [Step].

This file can be opened with any pdf viewer, but it is better to use a pdf viewer that is ligth and has an auto-refresh mode (such as zathura for instance). To change the pdf viewer that is used by rdbgui4sasa, you can try to change your default pdf viewer, or you can set the PDF_VIEWER environment variable:

export PDF_VIEWER=zathura

Note that in the screenshot above, the [Manual Central] daemon in selected. It means that one can only trigger one node at each step (only the buttons corresponding to enabled node are shown). If one select the [Manual] daemon instead, the GUI looks different:

Here, you first need to select the node(s) you want to trigger, and then to click on the [Step] button (that is not present in the [Manual Central] mode).

If you select an automated daemon mode such as [Central], [Locally Central], [Distributed], or [Synchronous], even more buttons appear:

Indeed, the [Next Round], the [Back step], the [Undo], or the [Legit] buttons do not make sense in Manual modes. Another difference in automatic modes is that all processes have their corresponding buttons displayed (even when not enabled) and they can be assigned a priority. The behavior of rdbgui4sasa in automatic modes is that only enabled nodes with the higher priority can be triggered at each step.

Note for opam users: rdbgui4sasa is not part of the sasa opam package:

opam depext -y rdbgui4sasa
opam install -y rdbgui4sasa