The menus have been designed in a non-hierarchical manner. This means that any of the commands can be activated and passed to the interpreter. Commands can be displayed on the display screen where they are activated by picking, but they can also be typed in the terminal or graphics windows. There is no equivalent of the FRODO CHAT mode nor of nested pull-down or pop-up menus.
Each new release of the program is usually accompanied by new versions of files startup.o and menu.o, that have the program version number appended to their names. For example, for release 5.10 of the program, the startup files are called startup_5.10.o and menu_5.10.o. An O macro file is also provided to read in these and make any other changes that are needed to the user's existing databases. This macro is called update_[version].omac. Users can also personalize the program's keywords by editing the menu.o file; however this is not recommended if macros are going to be exchanged with other users.
It is recommended that a simple screen layout is adopted, consisting of frequently used commands, personalized macros, frequently used input values and the options controlling object visibility. Much more complicated menus can, however, be designed. In principle, it would be possible to mimic much of the appearance of FRODO. However, in our experience, users will quickly prefer to use their own macros, tailored to do repetitive, complex tasks (see @two_molecules in Appendix E, for example).