Mail Archives: geda-user/2012/10/26/14:50:33
On Oct 26, 2012, at 12:20 PM, Markus Hitter wrote:
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> Am 26.10.2012 um 17:39 schrieb John Doty:
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>> It seems to me that gschem and gnetlist have reached a state of near perfection within their architectural limitations.
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> Except their usage is confusing enough to make them a science on their own. If there weren't helpers like xgsch2pcb or the recent direct schematics import I couldn't encourage people to use gEDA. Competitors like Fritzing are so much easier and more intuitive to use.
That's the usual "I don't want a toolkit, but an integrated tool" complaint. But Fritzing can't do most of the things that gEDA can.
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>> I can see somebody writing a new schematic editor using 21st century GUI conventions, but it wouldn't be gschem, it would be a new development.
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> And how does that stop gschem moving to 21st GUI conventions, too?
Because the internals of gschem reflect very old notions of GUI. You can't get there from here in any practical way.
> Currently we have ridiculous situations like that pcb and gschem can't even agree on the same mouse button for panning/zooming.
They are separate, independent tools with separate, independent histories, both predating modern GUI conventions. Why would you expect consistency here?
> Much less on other usage items. Arguments like "that's the most powerful way" - which actually means "I'm used to this" - can't be right for both.
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> What I simply do not get is why so many gEDA users literally insist on gEDA's GUI being non-conformant to any other GUI tool out there.
Trying to tinker with gschem to make it look modern will result in a miserable kludge. But understand that gschem is actually a very shallow tool: it's simply a graphical editor for a rather simple file format. So, start with a modern GUI framework, the gEDA schematic file format, and fill in the glue. Leave gschem alone for those of us who are used to it.
> Or where else have you seen a tool which requires typing "e" and "r" in that order to rotate an item?
Viewlogic. Two decades ago. gschem is very old-fashioned.
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> We agree gEDA's strength is it's clean text file format. Because it's hand-editable, because it's easily scriptable. Now please explain how a simple file format enforces complex, unintuitive, hard to learn GUIs for editing them visually.
It doesn't. And a new editor would be fine. A broken kludge based on gschem would not.
John Doty Noqsi Aerospace, Ltd.
http://www.noqsi.com/
jpd AT noqsi DOT com
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