Cats2D Multiphysics > Overview > Interactive menus

Cats2D text-based user interface

When Cats2D is executed at the command line of a Unix terminal window, the first screen appears as shown below (in this example the edge-defined film-fed crystal growth method is modeled). Basic information about the problem type and size is displayed, and the main menu prompts the user to make a selection:

~/Programming/cats2d/jobs/efg/efg_csi>cats2d
		
		Cats2D 7.01.31 (Crystallization and Transport Simulator)
		 Copyright 1992-2017 Andrew Yeckel and Ralph T. Goodwin

geometry(axisymmetric)
reference-frame(translational,2)
energy(on)
flow(on,1)
mesh(on)

8 auto-shape boundary conditions were imposed
4 auto-no slip boundary conditions were imposed
       
5720 Elements   23205 Nodes   58577 Equations   256 Partitions

======================================================================================
                            * C A T S   2 D   7.01.31 *       Copyright © 1992-2017
======================================================================================
 1 File                                          5 Parameter
 2 Steady                                        6 Analysis
 3 Transient                                     7 Macro
 4 Postprocess                                   8 Mesh

Choice:

All choices in the main menu cause a submenu to be displayed. The layout of these main submenus is shown here. These submenus give choices corresponding to actions, settings, and more submenus, as shown here for the postprocessor.

Menus are navigated by descending through submenus to the desired action, then returning to the main menu by quitting each submenu. The menu hierarchy is rather flat, which is to say that there are only a few levels of submenus in the code, so moving from one menu to another is usually as simple as quitting submenus once or twice by typing 'q', then descending one or two submenus to the next targeted action. To solve a problem and make a contour plot, for example, we can select the solver menu from the main menu, select the solve action, then quit back to the main menu and select the postprocessor, where we select contour plot, choose a variable type, and set the number and range of contours. Quitting twice takes us back to the main menu where we can select the File menu to save the solution to file if desired.