🚀 go-pugleaf

Russell <rjshaw@iprimus.com.au> wrote:

>John Devereux wrote:
>> Russell <rjshaw@iprimus.com.au> wrote:
>> 
>>>For its age, you'd think it would have all the quirks and bugs
>>>worked out.
>> 
>> It does; I have only encountered one significant bug in ~15
>> years use. I think the yearly fee is more for support and
>> program update rights, rather than bug fixes.
>
>This is the kind of thing i hate:
>- open a schematic symbol library like C:\vutrax\lib\74hc\h00_44.log
>- draw a box around the top left symbol (NAND2-HC00)
>- do Edit|Clipboard|Copy-Boxed-to-Clipbrd
>- click inside the box
>
>This gives an error: Box must be a closed rectangle along X and Y axes.
>Now where's the help button or faq on this stupid error?
>Only this morning did i figure out to click near a corner of the
>box instead of the gate within the box.
>I could write far better software than this.

You don't need the box for a complete "JOINed" schematic
symbol - it will be treated as a single structure. You could
just right-click it and select "copy", (to use the Windows
approach to these things).

In fact I have only just noticed that you can do this; for
15 years I have been typing "lib", then clicking on the
symbol, to copy it! This was the pre-windows approach.

Going back to your problem with the box. When you draw a
box, it is actually part of the drawing. It's not the
"selection box" that you often see in other windows
programs. There could be many such boxes in a drawing, so
VUTRAX has no way to know which one you want, unless you
actually click on it. What they should have done is have a
"selection box" that is distinct from a "drawn box". This is
a general problem in VUTRAX IMHO; they use the same basic
constructs to do too many separate functions. While very
flexible, this does lead to confusion and errors. For
example, while routing a board, adding a track segment, you
can accidentally click on a component outline instead of a
track. The program tries to modify the outline, reports an
error and waits for those 2 annoying seconds.

Component outlines are protected anyway, so it shouldn't
even be possible to select them for this sort of command.

At the end of the day though, these are just annoyances.
VUTRAX is, for me, an acceptably productive and flexible
environment.

-- 
John Devereux

john@devereux.demon.co.uk