14 - How to modify NEURON itself

Summary

He called it the Sleet's crow's-nest, in honor of himself; he being the original inventor and patentee, and free from all ridiculous false delicacy, and holding that if we call our own children after our own names (we fathers being the original inventors and patentees), so likewise should we denominate after ourselves any other apparatus we may beget.

NEURON's extensive library of functions and graphical tools has been developed with an eye to providing those features that are most widely applicable in empirically based neural modeling. Since they are necessarily rather generic, it is sometimes desirable to change these features or add new ones in order to meet the special needs of individual projects. This is particularly important where the graphical user interface (GUI) is concerned, given the well-established role of the GUI in enhancing software utility. Here we show how to create new GUI tools and add new functions to NEURON.

A word about graphics terminology

Computer graphics literature is full of technical jargon, of which we will use only the most minute part. Think of a scene as being like a sheet of paper that has its own coordinate system (scene coordinates), and a view as a rectangular area on that sheet.