The Gtopo places file

It is useful to have gtopo maintain a set of "favorite places" that can quickly be accessed. The places file allows this to be arranged.

First create a .gtopo directory in your own hom directory if you have not already done so. Then inside of this directory (where the config file also lives), create a file named places. This file can contain blank lines and comment lines (comment lines begin with a # character) which are ignored.

Places are stored as longitude, latitude, and comments. A short places file might look like:

# This is the gtopo places file
# long, lat, place name

-114.9894 36.2338 Near Las Vegas Nevada
-118:21:00 37:24:00 Laws, Inyo County
-105.804 39.78 Berthoud Pass, Colorado
# THE END
Everything after the first two columns (or three if the place includes a map scale designator in the first column) is treated as the "name" of the location. Locations are in degrees either as fractional degrees or degrees:minutes:seconds.

This file is read into gtopo when it starts up (gtopo also looks for a system wide file in /etc/gtopo/places and is presented to the user as a menu when the user types the letter p or P or control-P. Click on the place and there you go. Hopefully pretty much self-explanatory.

This is new as of 3/2009 and new features are being added and bugs fixed. If you try this and find new bugs, send me email and report them.


Feedback? Questions? Drop me a line!

Gtopo / [email protected]