Last updated: April 10, 2005
For the time being, the program is distributed with the command line interface that is used during its development. Currently, this does not include any programming language; commands are in the form "command [args]" where command is the name of the command, and [args] are optional arguments. When convenient, the arguments for a given command are fetched through an appropriate user interaction instead of being given on the command line.
Anytime you have the prompt, you can say "help", and will then enter the program's interactive help facility, that you exit with "q". This is currently rather incomplete (if only because there has at this point been no serious thought about which commands ought to be part of the standard interface for the program, and many aspects of the program organization are still undecided), but at least it will give you a full list of the currently defined commands, and whatever help is available for them.
By default, the command line interaction is managed through the GNU readline library; this provides functionality analogous to the one in the linux shell (which usually also uses that same library.) In particular, up and down arrows move through the command history, right and left arrows move the cursor on the command line, which is fully editable, and tabbed command completion is available. The behavior can be parametrized on a user-by-user basis (see here for more details) using the application name "Atlas" that is set by the program on startup. For instance, to change the bell-behavior from the predefined "audible" to "none", you would include the following three lines in the .inputrc file in your home directory:
$if Atlas set bell-style none $endif
If for some reason readline is not available on your system, it is easy to compile the program to do without. You will then no longer have command history, left and right arrows will not work, and neither will tabbed command completion. However, it is still possible to enter incomplete command names, as long as they are unambiguous (say "ca" for "cartan" for instance.) If there is an ambiguity, the program will present you with the various choices.