gEDA-user: Feature Request Status-Terminal instead of dialogue and info boxes

[Torsten Wagner <torsten.wagner@xxxxxxxxx>]

   Dear Community,
   I just start to find out about gEDA. Maybe my request is completely
   stupid. Maybe it was discussed hundred times already. Maybe a newbie
   is not in position to request a change of a program as old as pcb ;)
   .  I tried to parse the webpage and the mail list for infos but didn't
   find something related.
   As wrote in an earlier post,  I use a tiling window manager. This
   concept has problems with fixed size dialogue boxes, however, I could
   twist and turn some knobs to get a solution for that.
   Nevertheless I start to explore gschem and pcb and first of all I like
   it a lot. Esp. the text based files are great. I can emacs into them
   and just use a few keyboard macros to add and delete nearly everything
   I like to change without having to fiddle around with GUIs. Back in
   pcb and gschem I noticed that very often pop-up info boxes and
   dialogue boxes arouse. Many of them only contain a few lines of text
   info. E.g., at start-up, after autorouting, after rat-net
   optimisation, etc.
   I think in that case dialouge boxes might be the wrong way to inform
   an professional user (I simply assume that geda-users are professional
   computer users). They distract a lot and might become annoying over
   time...
   E.g., move around some footprints in pcb and keep pressing "O" to see
   how the rats nets comes up. After reading the upcoming pop-up which
   informs " X rat lines remaining" are placed and press Close for the
   30th time it is simply annoying.
   Other programs use a fixed status bar or even more mature a status
   terminal.
   This little window resist at the bottom of the main window and prints
   all kind of messages from gschem ore resp. pcb the user might like to
   read. Since it keeps a history of the messages a user can simply
   scroll up and down to see what happens.
   Normally 3-5 lines of text are enough to show an experienced user what
   is going on with the program. He can execute function over function
   ignoring the upcoming text in the terminal without getting distracted
   by message boxes and only if something went wrong he can check the
   terminal output. Furthermore, some highlighting (e.g. errors appear
   red) and some search facility make it easy to spot whether there is
   any error.
   This terminal could be extend for input as well, allowing easy
   scripting which I miss in pcb at the moment. (E.g. I like to type
   functions like "m 12000 14000" to move the marked object to the
   coordinates 12000,14000).
   Other open source projects who utilise such a termial window use
   embedded python, lua or some other scripting language which gives very
   powerful scripting features.
   Furthermore, this creates a central place for all kind of messages
   makes it easy for a community driven project to help by state :"If you
   are going to post about a problem, please add the terminal history to
   your post".
   I would be happy to hear what you think about such a feature.
   Best regards,
   Torsten
   PS. I just noticed that the pop-up window will be reused to print
   messages if not closed. However, I would still prefer to have it fixed
   integrated in the main window.


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