Using the RSG dialog builder is an alternative to using the Abaqus GUI Toolkit commands and a text editor to create dialog boxes. The Really Simple GUI (RSG) Dialog Builder plug-in enables you to create dialog boxes and connect them to kernel commands without writing any code. You select items from a toolbox to add them to an empty dialog box and edit their properties.

The RSG dialog builder provides access to a subset of the commands in the Abaqus GUI Toolkit, but it requires no programming experience to produce a working dialog box. The dialog boxes that you create become new plug-ins to Abaqus/CAE. You can save them as either RSG plug-ins or standard plug-ins, but you can only edit RSG plug-ins with the RSG dialog builder. You must use a text editor to edit standard plug-ins. However, saving an RSG dialog box as a standard plug-in allows an experienced programmer to extend the dialog's functionality by selecting from the complete set of Abaqus GUI Toolkit commands.

The RSG dialog builder plug-in includes a “Five minute tour” that describes and shows some of the basic functions that you can use to build a custom dialog box. The tour icon is located at the upper left corner of the GUI tabbed page in the RSG Dialog Builder.