Remote Control

Gwyddion provides means to open files in an already running instance of the application and to test whether any instance is running on a given display. These operations are performed by so called remote control command line options. When they are given to the program, it does not start the user interface as usual, instead it attempts to communicate with an already running Gwyddion. All the remote control options take the form --remote-*:

--remote-new

Proably the most useful option. It opens the files given on the command line in an already running instance of Gwyddion. If none is running, it starts new Gwyddion as if --remote-new was not given – in this case, and only in this case, start-up options such as --no-splash have the intended effect (and make sense).

File type associations are created to run Gwyddion with this option by default.

--remote-existing

This options opens the files given on the command line in an already running instance of Gwyddion, in this case the command succeeds. However, if none is running it silently fails instead of starting a new one. This can be useful when you want to handle failure differently than by starting a new Gwyddion.

--remote-query

If an instance is already running, this option prints its toolbox window id (Window on X11, HWND on Win32) and succeeds. If none is running, it silently fails.

If more than one instance of Gwyddion is running on the display, the remote control will choose an arbitrary one.