XTide can work with X-windows, plain text terminals, or the web. This is accomplished with three separate programs: the interactive interface (xtide), the non-interactive or command line interface (tide), and the web interface (xttpd).

xtide is the interactive X-windows client for XTide 2. Although in reality it accepts many command line options, you should not need to use them; everything can be done interactively. Just run xtide and point and click your way to whatever you need. If you get stuck, click on a `?' button for on-line help.

For a complete discussion of the command line options and a detailed explanation of the interactive interface, please see the verbose documentation at .

export HFILE_PATH=/usr/local/share/xtide/harmonics.tcd

If the optional World Vector Shoreline files have been installed, the path to those files can be supplied in the WVS_DIR environment variable or as the second line of the configuration file.

Set the environment variable XTIDE_DEFAULT_LOCATION to the name of your favorite place if you want to skip the location-choosing step.

-l ``location name''

Specify a location for tide predictions. When given to the interactive client, this causes it to start a tide clock for the specified location instead of launching a location chooser on startup. This is useful for starting a tide clock automatically when you log on. Multiple uses of -l will result in multiple tide clocks.