Greg M. Johnson wrote:
> I saw on a forum for a command-line MPG generation tool where some kid was 
> giving the syntax he uses, and it must have been four lines of text!   No 
> way that bloke is typing it out each time. I'm betting he has his most 
> popularly-used syntax stored in some text editor.

He most likely has written a simple shell script for this.  Also don't 
forget you have a command history.

> I've tried some of the GUI editors for povray like Pyvon and QTPOV.  They 
> have their strengths. I have however figured out a way to get most of the 
> old Windows GUI look and feel to my povray experience on my own:
> 
> 1) Edit scene files in Kedit, with a separate window open for each scene 
> file you're currently thinking about.

Note using KWrite/Kate instead of KEdit will give you syntax 
highlighting.  In Kate you can avoid the separate windows and have tabs 
for each file like in WinPOV.

> There are actually strengths to *this* setup over perhaps even the windows 
> GUI.   

Quite a lot, for example:

- you can use different POV-Ray versions (official/MegaPOV) in parallel 
without having two separate editors open.
- you can run several renders at the same time without having multiple 
separate editors open.
- you can completely transparently work and render on different machines

> Perhaps I was too clueless to imagine this setup right off the bat. 
> I'm actually guessing that not too many of you are actually going *pure* 
> command line day in day out, perhaps even using "vi".

I think using ini files for the render settings like you describe is 
quite rare.  Storing the commonly used options in a scene file comment 
and putting them to the command line using cut&paste is what i do quite 
often.

> But I'm wondering if 
> someone were to have suggested this setup to me when I started griping about 
> the lack of GUI   that I would have been satisfied much earlier. 

Interesting point.  Note people quite regularly mention that they use a 
standard editor and the command line for operating POV-Ray.  But in fact 
this is something that is obvious to most regular Unix users so it is 
seldom pointed out explicitly. ;-)

But indeed for newcomers (not to POV-Ray but to the platform) the 
possibilities probably could be better described.

Christoph

-- 
POV-Ray tutorials, include files, Landscape of the week:
http://www.tu-bs.de/~y0013390/ (Last updated 24 Jul. 2005)
MegaPOV with mechanics simulation: http://megapov.inetart.net/

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