Feature request: command line control of Stellarium

[Matthew Gates]

Hi, I want to suggest a feature. I dont know where else to post this.

Is it possible to program Stellarium so if someone passes variables thru the command line ,ex: "Stellarium.exe -s moon" which will open up Stellarium showing the moon. This will become a very powerful feature when integrating Stellarium with other astronomical software.

Also if someone can develop an extension for chrome and firefox webmasters can embed links on there websites so when a user clicks a link it open up Stellarium with the given query. example: <a href="Stellarium:spica">click to see Spica</a>

Thanks.

[Matthew Gates (matthew-porpoisehead)]

Difficult to come up with the x-platform method of doing the "if not running, start new instance, else tell running instance to look at object X".

Firefox does this by having a wrapper script on *nix systems, and renaming the actual binary firefox-bin. We might try a similar approach. It might be more aesthetically pleasing to have a common program rather than a wrapper script on one platform and a binary wrapper on others. However, the code for the IPC will be totally OS dependent, so I don't know how much benefit there is to that approach.

[Matthew Gates (matthew-porpoisehead)]

Originally posted as a question: https://answers.launchpad.net/stellarium/+question/161513

[Bogdan Marinov (daggerstab)]

Wouldn't it be a better implementation if it was possible to have command line execution of scripts? Then we can also associate the .ssc file type with Stellarium. *That* has been in my personal wishlist for quite some time.

[Matthew Gates (matthew-porpoisehead)]

@ Bogdan: agreed both passing a filename of a script file, and possible also a fixed string script on the command line (in the same manner as perl -e 'script text...').

However, the difficult part still remains talking to a running instance of the program.

[අනුරාධ Jayathilaka (astroanu)]

I dont know much about programming thats why i stayed silent. :) I guess its a bit hard to implement feature. But anyway if somehow if you guys manage to implement it stellarium will become more versatile. .ssc file association idea is also really great.

[Alexander Wolf (alexwolf)]

related bug #694489

[Michaelo (o2l)]

Would it be possible on start up, to have Stellarium look for and read a specific file on all platforms...
If the file exists, process it, if not... do nothing...

Then it would be up individual users to create the start up script files by other means... thiss way Stellarium can remain independent of OS's...
Mike

PS... I'm not sure if a method to do this already exists as I came across some code that suggest I could use the following code in windows... stellarium.exe -altitude 13 -longitude +53d58\'16.65\" -latitude -1d4\'27.48\" -sky-date 20120125 -sky-time 23:00:00 .. however it doesn't work so I guess I need the option too ;)

[Alexander Wolf (alexwolf)]

Do you mean startup.ssc, which runs automatically at startup?

[Alexander Wolf (alexwolf)]

The bug report was moved to https://github.com/Stellarium/stellarium/issues/472