OptoinsExplorer Installation

About

Mathematica has too many functions and it is not easy to remember all of their properties. OptionsExplorer provides an interactive tool to simplify the work with options of the functions. It opens a dialog window designed for getting information about functions, selecting their values and inserting the activated options into the editing expression. In addition to the Mathematica default set of options the package introduces alternative and preset options. Alternative options may include several values for a particular option thus any possible combination of alternatives can be selected. Preset options allow choosing extra sets of options.

© Yuri E. Kandrashkin, 2004-2006

Installation

Find the installation directory

Evaluate the following cell to get user base directory on your system:

$BaseDirectory
$UserBaseDirectory

This gives the folders where the package can be placed.

Copy files to a selected directory

If previous version of OptionsExplorer was installed remove its folder. Unpack and copy the directory OptionsExplorer into Applications subdirectory of $BaseDirectory or $UserBaseDirectory. 
This allows loading the package through its context name or short path:

Needs["OptionsExplorer`"]

Rebuild Help Index

Execute the menu command Help ⊳ Rebuild Help Index

This adds OptionsExplorer help file in Help Browser.

Add menu and keyboard shortcut command

OptionsExplorer needs menu command to be added in file MenuSetup.tr. To get path to this file evaluate next cell (for OS Windows):

\(ToFileName[{$TopDirectory, "SystemFiles", "FrontEnd", "TextResources", "Windows"}]\)

Create the subdirectories in the same order in your base directory and copy the file MenuSetup.tr there. Insert the following lines after the Item["&Make Template",...]:

, Item["Options &Explorer", KernelExecute[ToExpression["OptionsExplorer[]"]],
 		MenuKey["o",Modifiers->{Control,Command}], MenuEvaluator->Automatic]

and restart Mathematica.

This adds new menu item Input ⊳ Options Explorer and sets keyboard shortcut Alt|Ctrl[o] (for Windows). These commands applied to selected function in input cell opens OptionExplorer dialog window.

Note, this feature doesn't work on cells with format type InputForm.

Make autoloading package

Save in the directory Kernel of your $BaseDirectory or $UserBaseDirectory the file init.m with the following line (or add this line if the file init.m already exists):

Needs["OptionsExplorer`"]

This allows the package to load with the Mathematica kernel.