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

[Peter Clifton <pcjc2@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 2009-11-17 at 22:26 +0900, Torsten Wagner wrote:
> Dear Community,

>    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.

Urm... yes. I tend to give up and leave it open, behind my main PCB
window - but it is a pain indeed. There are probably a few other
examples too.

Perhaps we could add another button "Hide". "Hide" could have the
current behaviour, where the dialog pops back up.

"Close" would close the window for good - until it was explicitly
requested again. (This would probably have to be backed by some
persistent storage of log-messages whilst the window is closed).


>    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.

Not a bad idea - although I don't typically want the log anyway - so the
status window would seal screen-space I otherwise don't loose.

>    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).

That is often requested - and probably not "that" hard to implement.

If you have the right options in File->Preferences set, "General", then
un-tick "Use a separate window for command entry".

Pressing ":" gets you a command entry in the status-bar area of the app.

I think the advantage of having the command entry as a separate window,
is that there is a "Help" button which lists some common actions.
Probably we should make that accessible with the status-bar version too.

Run "pcb --show-actions" for a simple text list. It is probably also
dumped somewhere into the generated documentation.
"/usr/share/doc/pcb/pcb.pdf" ?

Syntax like you quoted is not possible, but there are probably more
long-winded equivalents.

>    I would be happy to hear what you think about such a feature.

Not a bad idea - just one which will require someone motivated to
implement it. (In a way which is portable to PCB's lesstif HID as well
as the GTK one).

Btw.. with your no-frills WM etc.., you "might" get along better with
PCB's "lesstif" GUI.

(No GL there yet, sorry)

./configure ..... --with-gui=lesstif

IIRC.




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