There are several ways to call the program, first with a file that has commands in it, suppose the file is xor.bp then you can use:
bp xor.bpThe program could be called without the file name and you could use buttons within the program to read a file full of commands if you wanted to.
The other possible command line option is to specify the geometry of the window that pops up, the default geometry is 800x600+0+0 but this can be changed on the command line as in:
bp -g 640x480+0+0 xor.bpNote: "-geometry" doesn't work and you could skip the width and height portion as in:
bp -g +0+0 xor.bp
There are a few plain menus in the program, the File menu and the Cmds menu, the other buttons on the top line of the menu bar select menu windows where there are combinations of buttons, entry boxes and informative text.
Entry boxes are of three kinds. For entry boxes with black text on a light gray background you type in the parameter value followed by a carriage return and then the corresponding typed command is written at the bottom of the canvas area and sent over to the C program where it is actually processed. If you neglect the carriage return then leaving the menu window by the "Change" button on the bottom will still update the parameters and list the typed commands at the bottom of the canvas area. If you select an "Exit" or "Cancel" button none of the values you typed in without the carriage return will be updated.
If an entry box has red text on a white background typing a carriage return will have no effect, you need to select another button in the menu window. For example in the T (Training) menu window it says:
Run 100 iterations and print every 10and the 100 and 10 are both red on a white background. In this case you can change the entry box values and then click the "Run" button. This "Run" command is simply one of a number of commands where values are only set when some action is taken.
An entry box with blue text on a white background contains a value or string that is simply informative and you should not change it, and in fact you can't change the parameter or string inside the C program.
Output from commands is written to the bottom of the canvas area, the default is to keep 100 lines, only a fraction of which will actually be visible, to see older lines use the vertical scrollbar. The number of lines to keep can be reset by going to the GUI menu window and entering a new value in the "Maximum Lines" entry box.
When there is a large amount of output from a command it is convenient to get it page by page and to stop the output of the command if necessary. For example you may have 100 patterns to list and if you decide to list them you may be happy seeing only the first 24. To implement paging the program resets a line count parameter for every command and when the number of lines output from the command reaches the page size a "More?" box comes up that works like the traditional more command only here you have to click your choice rather than type. The choices are one more page, half a page, one line, stop paging or break the command loop. The default page size is 24 and it can be reset by entering a new value in the entry box in the GUI menu window.
You can change the font used in the canvas area by selecting Fonts in the GUI menu window. I chose what I thought were good fixed width fonts for screen resolutions of 800x600 or 640x480, if you don't like them you can go to the top of the bp.tcl file and enter whatever fonts you have available. Some systems will not have all the fonts (like VGA) that I am using. A fixed width font is desirable so that the outputs of commands will line up just right, the program is not set up to deal with variable width fonts. If you want to increase the number of fonts you will have to go deeper into the program to add them.
If you want to change the entry box font you need to look for the variable entryboxfont in the bp.tcl file and change that.
In the GUI menu window you can choose the background color and the text color. I chose what I thought are reasonable combinations, black on white or almost white or white, green, yellow and orange on dark blue or black. If you want to use other colors edit the color entries near the beginning of the bp.tcl file. If you want to increase the number of colors you will have to go deeper into the program to add them.