The primary user interface to Patran is composed of a main form with six basic features. Across the top of the main form is a menu bar through which a pull down menu system can be accessed. To the extreme right of the menu bar are icons that can be used to run common operations such as refreshing graphics, establishing the default window layering, resetting graphics, interrupting an operation in progress, providing a heartbeat monitor, undoing the last operation, or providing information about Patran. Next, is the switch bar, which is used to access forms that control the operations used to set up geometry, to mesh a model, to assign loads and boundary conditions, analyze a model, display the results, and so on.The fourth item on the display is the tool bar, which provides a ‘short cut’ to many of the settings available through the pull down menus. After the tool bar is the history window. This is a text window that can be scrolled by placing the cursor in the window with the mouse and using the up and down arrow keys or the scroll bar to the right of the window. The line of text on which the cursor is placed will appear in the sixth item on the display, the command line. The command line is a data box that allows for the direct entry of PCL code and commands that can be used to direct almost any operation through a command line rather than a graphical interface.

Any operations through the menu bar, the switch bar, the tool bar, or entered on the command line may cause an entry to appear in the history window and to be echoed to the session and journal files. The history window, the session file, and the journal file list information that are either comments or commands in the PCL programming language.