1.3) IDL Setup

In order to make colours display correctly and for IDL windows to behave as expected in a Unix environment, we need to make some changes to how IDL treats them. We can do this by creating and IDL startup script which IDL runs every time it starts.

Create a directory called "IDL" in your home directory. In this directory, create a text file called "idl_start.pro" and enter the following lines.

device, true_color=24
device,retain=2,decomposed=0
loadct,0

Now in your home directory, edit your ".cshrc" file to include the following line. Modify the contents of the line to include the correct path to your account.

setenv IDL_STARTUP /home/myname/IDL/idl_start.pro

Now when you start IDL, this piece of code will be run every time.