A discussion last week culminated in the following thought. Certain functionality, especially command-line options are not very discoverable. Running with -help is quite verbose, especially when multilevels solvers are in use, and this can be rather overwhelming. Something that seems readily implementable (provided a cross-platform GUI toolkit is available) is a hierarchical help browser. My thought was that -help_gui could bring up something like a two-pane browser with options on the left (hierarchical and collapsed by default, perhaps with "advanced" stuff colored differently) and corresponding man pages on the right. All this semantic information is already available, although "level" is only present in the man pages themselves.
For certain options, such as lists and enums, dropdown menus could be presented, with the gui producing a suitable command-line. I don't know which GUI toolkits are viable options, nor how easy it is to embed HTML rendering (maybe just wait until everyone has WebKit?). I just wanted to put this idea out for something to think about, it seems like it would improve discoverability and help to eliminate the context switch between looking up documentation and configuring solvers. Something I personally would like more is bash completion, but that is tricky because the available options can't be presented without running the program. Cutting the job off early is awkward because some options aren't available until PCSetUp which is well within the solve phase, thus it may take a long time to get that far (a matrix needs to be assembled first). I'm not sure whether this cost would be excessive compared to scp and friends which actually establish an SSH session to the remote machine when you press TAB. Jed
