Hi all, You may recall that I traded a few messages with you folks a while back and expressed my intent to become a contributor. I still intend to do that (really)! I've been so bogged down with for for school (work 95% involving gschem and pcb) that I haven't had any time to play with the source for said tools. It has, however, driven me to create a list of the things that I find most annoying or would really like to have. If I had more free time and I were more familiar with the code, I'd take some of these on, but I think I'm going to be busy until March. Maybe I'll get a respite over the holidays...
Keep in mind that I may now be behind by a version since the release of that .iso mentioned on the list in the recent past, since I install from fedora RPMs from the main repositories. Some of these may also be me not being able to find a feature, in which case please point me in the right direciton. My suggestions for gschem: 1) When adding properties using the "edit" command (key binding "ee"), new properties should default to show value only. that would both make it more useful and make it the same as the "aa" command. 2) This is a monumental task, I think. I'd like to see an "overview diagram" mode that shows multiple .sch files on one screen with offpage connectors being replaced with the connections they correspond to in the other schematics. Seperately, a "block diagram" mode might be nice (I get the sense this almost exists, but not quite) where each .sch is represented by a block and only connections made by off-page connectors are drawn between them. 3) auto-arrange or auto-layout of components (groups of components when selected). Such as "distribute components equally spaced vertically" and things of that nature. Another example: "align all components with left-most one". I find it amazing this doesn't exist, so maybe I just can't find it? 4) refresh the view more often. I'm constantly hitting "vr" because the view gets garbled, usually as the result of dragging a net with "rubber band" mode turned on. 5) A way to autonumber in DIP order for making pins on symbols. I've seen things about a new autonumber text dialog that might do the trick, but it hasn't made its way into my version of gschem yet. 6) A way to select whole nets at once (bonus points: auto simplification of said net) 7) an option to antialias graphics (or at least text). this is especially important when trying to read things when zoomed very far out 8) PNG export option: switch color scheme (so I can design with the black one and export the white one) 9) nets should extend from starting point in the direction of inital mouse movement, instead of the current default of always moving in the X axis, then the Y. I'd consider Xilinx (shudder) an example of the behavior I'm talking about. 10) get rid of the title-border thing when you create a blank schematic - it's a hack! It shouldn't be a symbol, it should be added by software at print time. This would also facilitate a "shrink to page" option for printing large schematics on a single page but retaining the title box at the size of the paper. I always delete the box as the first step upon opening gschem; it's especially annoying when you're trying to make a new symbol (something I do often...). 11) ability to edit/remove attributes to multiple symbols on a schematic at once. It's possible to add them to multiple symbols, so why not edit or remove? I'd expect it to show a dialog like the one the "ee" command produces, except with the union of the fields of all the selected symbols. 12) ability to have symbols with a different number of pins than the physical device they represent. Example: the ADXL321 acceleromter from Analog Devices has nearly all its pins duplicated a bunch of times, but for some inane reason you need to connect all of them. I'd like the symbol to have one "ground" pin and one "power" pin, but when gsch2pcb converts it to a netlist for the PCB program, the net containing the symbol's ground pin is the same net as all the ground pins on the physical device. Perhaps this should be a PCB part or footprint datum rather than something in the gschem symbol? Better example: ZXMN2A02X8 13) I should have made this one #1 on my list. It goes for all the geda/gaf tools, especially PCB! Please, please, support file names or paths with spaces in them! All hell breaks loose when I use spaces in my filenames. gschem hasn't given me much (any?) grief, but refdes_renum (which I fixed - I still need to send you the patch) and PCB both fail horribly. It should be as simple as adding some quotation marks around the paths, as it was with refdes_renum. I hope I don't sound too harsh. On the whole, I absolutely love all the parts of the suite that I've used so far. They're much higher quality (read: usable) than any of the commercial, "professional", "enterprise" (anyone read thedailywtf?) solutions I've encountered (multisim, orcad, xilinx, etc). I'm quite literally depending on these programs for my college degree and I have every faith in them. I'll be shipping off my first order of PCBs designed end-to-end with the geda/gaf tool suite tomorrow. Thanks, Ryan _______________________________________________ geda-dev mailing list [email protected] http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-dev
