8  The component library: Abstract

This chapter presents an abstract of the McStas component library’s structure and categories. It intentionally does not attempt to enumerate every component with its parameter list – the library is large and changes between releases, so any hand-maintained table here would inevitably drift out of date (as earlier editions of this manual did). Instead, each component category chapter that follows (Sources, Optics, Samples, Monitors, Misc, …) documents a curated selection of representative components in depth, with their full, current parameter lists pulled directly from the component source’s McDoc header at build time (see section 4.7 for the McDoc comment format). For the complete, authoritative, always-current list of every component and its parameters, use the mcdoc front-end:

1mcdoc 
2mcdoc searchterm 
3mcdoc file.comp

The first form generates and opens a browsable index.html catalog of the whole library (both the standard installation and any local/custom components); the second searches for and displays documentation for all components matching searchterm; the third displays the documentation of one specific component file. See section 3.5.8 in the User Manual for the full mcdoc reference.