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Invoking gmixvm

If you have built MDK with GTK+ support (see Installing MDK), a graphical front-end for the MIX virtual machine will be available in your system. You can invoke it by typing

     gmixvm [-vhuq] [--version] [--help] [--usage] [--noinit]
     

at your command prompt, where the options have the following meanings:

-v User Option
-version User Option
Prints version and copyleft information and exits.

-h User Option
-help User Option
-u User Option
-usage User Option
Prints a summary of available options and exits.

-q User Option
-noinit User Option
Do not load the Guile initialisation file ~/.mdk/mixguile.scm at startup. This file contains any local Scheme code to be executed by the embedded Guile interpreter at startup (see Using Scheme in mixvm and gmixvm).

Typing gmixvm or gmixvm -q at your command prompt, the main window will appear, offering you a graphical interface to run and debug your MIX programs. img/ss_mix.jpg

Apart from the menu and status bars, we can distinguish two zones (or halves) in this main window. In the upper half of gmixvm's main window there is a notebook with three pages, namely,

The application can run in two modes: non-split (the above windows are placed in a notebook in the main window) or split mode (the windows are detached from the main one, and can be hidden individually). You can choose the display mode using the corresponding command from the View menu.

Here is an screenshot showing how gmixvm looks like when running in split mode: img/ss_split.jpg

On the other hand, the main window's lower half presents you a mixvm command prompt and a logging area where results of the issued commands are presented (in split mode, these widgets occupy the whole main window's space between the menu and status bars). These widgets implement a mixvm console which offers almost the same functionality as its CLI counterpart.

When gmixvm is run, it creates a directory named .mdk in your home directory (if it does not already exist). The .mdk directory contains the program settings, the device files used by your MIX programs (see Devices), and a command history file.

The following sections describe the above mentioned components of gmixvm.