The Flent GUI

Flent comes equipped with a GUI to browse and plot previously captured datasets. The GUI requires PyQt4; if this is installed, it can be launched with the --gui parameter, or by launching the flent-gui binary. Additionally, if Flent is launched without parameters and without a controlling terminal, the GUI will be launched automatically.

The GUI can be used for interactively plotting previously captured datasets, and makes it easy to compare results from several test runs. It presents a tabbed interface to graphs of data files, allows dynamic configuration of plots, and includes a metadata browser. For each loaded data file, additional data files can be loaded and added to the plot, similar to what happens when specifying multiple input files for plotting on the command line. A checkbox controls whether the added data files are added as separate entries to the plot, or whether they are used for scaling the output (mirroring the --scale-mode) command line switch.

The GUI also incorporates matplotlib’s interactive browsing toolbar, enabling panning and zooming of the plot area, dynamic configuration of plot and axis parameters and labels and saving the plots to file. The exact dynamic features supported depends on the installed version of matplotlib.