The Map menu

• Map Chooser

• Map Display Bookmarks

• Locate Map Feature: Depends on GNIS data files from the USGS.

• Search Location: Use the online Nominatim server to look up addresses or other places of interest

• Coordinate Calculator: A tool for converting between coordinates in various systems.

• Center and zoom: pops up a dialog that lets you center the map on a particular set of coordinates and define how far out to zoom.

• Draw CAD Objects

• Disable Fast Zoom/Pan/Home: disables hot keys that manipulate the map position. Useful to prevent accidental map movement when working public service events.

• Disable All Maps: turn off all map drawing

• Enable Auto Maps: a very old feature that is not recommended anymore. It tries to decide on the fly which maps to display based on your position relative to their bounding box. Don't enable this. Other, newer features of Xastir do this job better than Auto Maps did.

• Enable Map Grid: draws a grid for the current coordinate system over your map

• Enable Map Border: If a grid is not enabled, this is greyed out. Otherwise, selecting it turns on a border around the map that shows the values of coordinates for the grid lines.

• Enable Map Levels: you want this enabled. It allows you to use the Map Properties dialog to set the order in which map files are drawn. This gives you a lot of control over how your maps display.

• Enable Map Labels: Enable drawing labels of features for shapefile maps. Sometimes those labels can clutter the map display and you want to turn them off briefly so they don't obscure other information.

• Enable Area Color Fills: Some polygon map files can have the polygons filled with color (either solid or stippled). Sometimes this can obscure information you want to see. This option allows you to turn off that feature so you can get the fill colors out of the way. For most use you want this check box selected.

• Enable weather alerts: If you have the appropriate shape files installed and are connected to an interface that has weather alert data, allow Xastir to highlight the area affected by the weather alert. You might want to turn this off if your map gets cluttered, but otherwise it's best to leave it enabled.

• Configure contains various sub menus that let you tinker with how the map is rendered.

• Map Pointer Menu: brings up a submenu exactly the same as the right-click context menu you'd get in the map window.