gEDA-dev: GTKWAVE version 3

[Anthony J Bybell]

On Wed, 19 Sep 2007, Matt Ettus wrote:

> I have to agree that gtkwave has come along quite a ways.  Reload must
> have saved me a couple of hours over the last 2 days alone.  I really
> like gtkwave now.

Good to hear that.  =)


> I just have 1 nit and a couple of minor feature requests....
>
> The nit is that I still do not grok the system used for selection and
> moving of signals that are already in the display pane.  Why doesn't
> it just follow the normal "click to select one, shift click to select
> a range, and crtl-click to select multiple items" rule?  I also don't
> understand the whole right click to swap kind of deal.  Why can't we
> just drag?  It isn't consistent with other gui tools, or even with
> itself -- other panes function normally.

The weird click scheme is old legacy stuff so cuts and moves could be done
one-handed.  That really came in handy a couple of years ago when I broke
my left wrist right before tapeout and had lots of debug to do on a pcix
chip.  It sort of stuck around after that...

Fixing that is at the top of my list for 3.1.2 (as it's replaced reload as
the top user feature request) and I'll probably start looking at it next
week.  It's not a gtk widget--just a drawable area--so I have to implement
the semantics manually.  No big deal but I'm busy testing the 3.1.1
release living in CVS.  Tabbed viewing capability (multiple waveforms at
once) will be in the 3.1.1 release.


> Minor requests -- a keyboard shortcut (or at least a menu selection
> with less than 3 or 4 levels of hierarchy) for "signed decimal" and
> "Analog Mode -- Step"

Add the following lines to your .gtkwaverc file:

accel "/Edit/Data Format/Signed Decimal" (null)
accel "/Edit/Data Format/Analog/Step" (null)

...however replace the (null) with whatever hotkeys you want for it (see
the example rc file in the root directory of the tarball for what the GTK
strings are).  This can actually be done for all menu options.

I really need to come up with a configuration editor one of these days as
most users don't know what config options even exist as they're buried
pretty deep in some cases.

Thanks for your feedback.

-Tony