Re: gEDA: user interface issues

[Dan McMahill <dan-at-NOSPAMmcmahill_dot_net>]

David Carr wrote:

> gschem is a bit odd in its use of two letter shortcuts.  At first, I too 
> found them unusual but I've come to appreciate them.  For me anyway, its 
> more comfortable to press "v" and then "r" to redraw than to twist my 
> hand to the left to press and hold "ctrl" and then hit "r".
> Its also worth noting here that all of gschem's key/mouse bindings are 
> completely reconfigurable.  If you don't like the way they are, you can 
> easily change them.  Perhaps we should create a "conventional EDA" 
> binding set that could be easily loaded by those who want it.  This 
> pertains to the middle button issue as well.

"conventional EDA"?  My first, and one true love in the EDA arena, was 
Cadnetix.  There was nothing standard about the UI when compared to 
todays tools.  It was based on SunView, yes indeed pre-X11 graphical 
environment.  The thing which rocked about Cadnetix is it was clear that 
the designers of it ranked each operation by how much you use it and 
made the most common ones the easiest.

To drive Cadnetix, you pretty much only use the mouse which stays in the 
middle of the drawing area (no moving to the screen edge for menus) and 
the "L keys" on a sun keyboard.  Some less used functions could be 
reached by the function keys.  A big part of what made Cadnetix so fast 
is you could keep one hand on one part of the keyboard and the other 
hand on the mouse.

I've found some more "modern" tools running on windows to be easier to 
get off the ground with than Cadnetix, but none could compete once you 
got used to both tools.

-Dan