Updates to fitacfclientgui

[egthomas]

This pull request implements major updates to fitacfclientgui when using the -color option, including:

• an on-screen menu explaining keyboard controls
• use of a data buffer allowing all beams to update when plotting options change
• a new ground scatter flag option (which can also be toggled with the g key)
• up/down arrow control of the color scale maximum

As an example using the Iceland East real-time data stream,

For testing, if you don't have access to a real-time data stream you can simulate one using fitacfserver (eg https://github.com/SuperDARN/rst/pull/273).

[ksterne]

@egthomas this looks great and very well on my Ubuntu 22 VM. I think this will come in handy whenever we're wanting to double check something at Fort Hays (we've spent several hours chasing an "issue" that this could have kept up from wasting time on).

I was going to comment on the different user experience or program functionality on whether or not the -color option used, but that seems to be a legacy item from before this pull request. Just for curiosity sake, is it easy to change the functionality regardless of if the color option is used? Namely, I'm thinking that if you enter in something like fitacfclientgui -v (host) (port) and then press p, instead of exiting it would change over to velocity. I'm not asking for this PR, but maybe as a way to start a to-do issue item that would be nice to have one day.

[egthomas]

@ksterne thanks for the feedback! That is a great point about the -color option - that was something I added much later to fitacfclientgui, and with modern terminals there's no reason it can't be the default.

I've just modified fitacfclientgui so that color mode is enabled by default. In case colors aren't supported by the user's terminal, the program will still work but in the original color-less mode.

[ksterne]

Thanks for taking a look at this @egthomas. I think that makes sense to set the default as the -color option since the functionality is greatly improved. I'm not sure of a case where this shouldn't be the default option. It looks like it would be easy to modify the default if it became necessary in the future. I'll merge this in now.

[ksterne]

One random question related to this program but not to the updates, in testing this I would enter the command for this GUI on a real radar stream without anything happening. I would have to run it multiple times in order for the display to come up. It was almost like it had to get the timing right to grab the first packet. Does that seem to sense and/or is that normal? It's possible I'm grabbing the data the wrong place causing this issue.

[egthomas]

@ksterne I've also noticed that when trying to connect to the VT radars' real-time streams (and probably some other groups' radars too). Not sure if it's a latency thing or something, but when I call fitacfclientgui at the radar site it connects on the first try; similarly if I launch a local radar simulator or fitacf server.

[ksterne]

Thanks for the quick response! That's good to hear that it's not just me. I'd think its something with trying to connect to another server. Maybe one day we'll get bugged enough by that to see what's going on or print out some message of what's going on.