Locally maintained IDL routines
There exists a useful local collection of IDL scripts, maintained in a CVS repository. These are also required by e.g. the IDL utilities for RAMSES. To use them, either ask Aake for access to the CVS repository, or include it directly from his home directory, by adding the following line to your ~/.bashrc:
export IDL_PATH="+~aake/idl:<IDL_DEFAULT>"
It is important to include the <IDL_DEFAULT> part, as otherwise IDL will not be able to find its own standard library. The "+" before the path tells IDL to also search subdirectories for scripts.
Other useful locally maintained IDL utilities include:
For RAMSES: <path_to_ramses>/utils/idl
Startup configuration
One can have IDL execute a script as it starts up, by adding the following to .bashrc
export IDL_STARTUP=~/.idlrc
and create the file .idlrc. An example .idlrc file with some useful settings is given below
cpu, tpool_nthreads=12 ; Enable parallel execution with up to 12 threads
DEVICE, TRUE_COLOR=24 ; Enable color plots when using plotting procedures
DEVICE, RETAIN=2 ; IDL updates windows when they are moved on screen
DEVICE, DECOMPOSED=0 ; Use indexed color tables
The default for tpool_nthreads is to use one thread per available CPU core. Setting a lower number is nice, to prevent IDL from using all the cores when sharing an analysis machine with other users.