Mail Archives: geda-user/2012/11/17/23:08:44
On Nov 17, 2012, at 6:32 PM, Markus Hitter wrote:
> Am 18.11.2012 01:13, schrieb Britton Kerin:
>> Even a modest amount of work with e.g. blender makes it worth learning
>> the keys. I'm no specialist but I used it make profiles of parts for radial
>> extrusion with OpenSCAD, its just not practical to do without hotkeys.
>
> IMHO and ideally, you need no keys at all. Especially not for things graphically as simple as a schematics editor. Keyboard keys should be optional accelerators and not a neccessity.
>
> Also IMHO, gschem is pretty good already, it's just the default mapping which shows it's age. And there is neither an inspector nor a right-click menu, one of which is also a standard these days.
>
> Things I've seen only in gschem and (almost) nowhere else:
>
> - mouse button mapping is different from that of an application it's often used side by side with, pcb
>
> - two-key menu accelerators
>
> - view changes are recorded in the undo/redo system somehow
>
> - the mouse pointer jumps on some operations - big no-no in modern GUIs
>
> - zooming centers the view somewhere - jumping views are a no-no in modern UIs as well
>
> - zooming with the mouse wheel zooms around the view center instead of around the mouse pointer location
>
> Some, but not all, are adjustable with presets in .gschemrc already, so it's just a matter of choosing the right defaults. IMO, doing so would be a pain for one vocal greybeard, but a relief for about any newbie.
The trivial ones are adjustable in gschemrc, but I'm not terribly concerned with those. I really don't care much if the delete key is "delete" rather than "d". This isn't even core developer territory: anybody can write a custom gschemrc and publish it.
It's the non-trivial things that are the serious barriers. The peculiar ways that selection, motion, and editing work. All those modal dialogs. Scripting in Guile (some of us like it, most will never touch it). Things like that.
If you had a BASIC interpreter and you wanted to change to Python, you could fiddle with keywords and notation, maybe add a few extra statements, and create something that looked vaguely like Python. But it wouldn't really *be* Python. It's not practical to change a BASIC interpreter into a Python interpreter by patching it. Similarly, gschem isn't constructed the way you'd construct a 21st century graphics application.
John Doty Noqsi Aerospace, Ltd.
http://www.noqsi.com/
jpd AT noqsi DOT com
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