Reason is the GUI for yt. It’s developed in wxPython, and all attempts have been made to expose a susbtantial API to enable interactive plot addition, as well as a command-line for examining raw data.
If you’ve downloaded the binary package for OSX, you can simply double-click the icon. Otherwise, if you have wxPython installed, and yt is installed globally, you should be able to simply type reason to initiate it.
When reason starts up, it will execute all the code in your plugin file, so any fields you’ve defined there will be defined in the dialog boxes.
Go ahead and open up a dataset now, using the file menu’s “Open Hierarchy” option. It’ll get added to the tree on the left. All of its subsequent derived data objects – slices, projections, spheres, etc – will be added there.
By right clicking on an output file, you can generate a slice. The software will automatically add a slice for all three axes; with projections, you’re given more control over the field, weight and axes.
Each created plot will reside in its own tabs; these tabs are linked in their display of fields, their width, and their center. They can be rearranged by clicking and dragging – for instance, multiple panes can be viewed at a single time by clicking and dragging to the region you’d like to split into.
These plots can be recentered by getting the context menu on the plot image and choosing to either center on the location of the click or to center on the location of maximum density.
Note
On some platforms, the right-click on a plot in wxPython is non-functional; on these platforms, double-click to pop up the context menu.
Give it a shot; re-center somewhere else. All of the plots generated at a given time will be linked, so they should all re-center on wherever you told them to.
Note
Even though a projection loses some information, by re-centering on two of the three axes, you can uniquely determine a new center.
So now we’ve got a slice through our data, and we’ve dealt with recentering, changing the width and so on. Now let’s try something more advanced.
You can generate a sphere by two methods. The first is to bring up the context menu on a plot (either right- or double-click it) and then requesting one. This will be centered at the current “plot center” and you can specify the width exactly.
Alternatively, you can hold down the shift key and click once on the center and once on the outer edge. This will generate a sphere using those two pieces of information as the defining characteristics.
This sphere will appear in the object tree as a child of the current plot.
Now that you have a sphere, you are able to make phase and profile plots from it. Right click on it in the object tree and choose to make either a phase (two-dimensional) or profile (one-dimensional) plot.
Each of these choices will present you with a constructor window, where you can enter the appropriate parameters to define the plot. Each of these options is reflected in the API for the BinnedProfile1D and BinnedProfile2D classes respectively.
Within the GUI, once you have selected a sphere, you can generate a cutting plane based on the mass-weighted angular momentum vector of that sphere, and centered at its center. You can access this by right-clicking on a sphere and choosing “Cutting Plane.”
Additionally, you can overlay a vector plot of the velocity vectors on this plot via the context menu.