Re: gEDA-user: Snap-to-pins, was: Stupid newbie question

[Ales Hvezda <ahvezda@moria.seul.org>]

Hi Dan,


[snip]
>So here's a feature which is very much related to this that I find extremely
>nice in a large unnamed, very high $$ commercial schematic capture tool.
>
>When you're in wire mode, i.e. placing wires in the schematic, there is 
>a little diamond which hilights the closest pin or wire segment (of a differen
>t
>net) to where the pointer is.  If you hit a certain hotkey, the wire
>will be completed to the hilighted point.  I find that I can wire up schematic
>s
>extremely quickly as I can be totally sloppy with my mouse movements and just
>keep hitting the snap-to hot key.  If I could figure how to do a screen captur
>e
>to mpeg movie I'd do it to fully illustrate how it works.  Hopefully I've 
>adequately described it in words.
>

The way I see things, there are two ways of implementing the snap
to pin/net:

	1. As the user draws nets, automatically snap to the nearest pin/net.
	   This would require a switch to turn this behavior off.  

	2. The mechanism that Dan pointed out above.  Nice because
	   it keeps the existing net drawing behavior while providing
	   a nice way of getting the desired snap to nearest. Though,
	   it might require net routing algorithm if we want to deal
	   with strictly ortho nets.

1. is probably easier to implement at this stage though you might be 
able to make some assumptions/simplifications to make 2. just as easy.

Also, for now, I would only worry about snapping to the endpoints of
pins and nets.  I don't think it is worth the effort (at this point)
to try to snap to the middle of nets or buses).

								-Ales