I've been wondering if it would be useful to add some user hooks into
various bits of gschem.
For example, if you select an instance in a schematic, maybe have gschem
do its normal thing (select the instance) and then if the hook has been
defined, run the guile procedure
(gschem-selected-instance-hook list_of_selected_instances)
Offhand, this one and hooks for selecting a net or an instance pin are
the big ones which come to mind.
It seems if you had this in place, you could set up an additional menu,
"Mode" perhaps, where you could pick if you are in pcb layout mode,
simulation mode, or whatever. If you're in pcb layout mode, you could
install hooks which cause communication between gschem and pcb so you
could select something on the schematic and have pcb select the
corresponding layout instance. If you're in simulation mode, selecting
a net or an instance pin could perhaps plot the signal or insert the
expression into a waveform calculator.
Currently, none of the hooks exist in the other tools which I have in
mind, but we have to start somewhere! I think for me, the crossprobing
between gschem and pcb (select an instance in one tool and have the
other tool automatically select the corresponding instance) is at the
top of my wish list.
Comments? Pointers to the spot in the code where such hooks would be added?
I think the ability to have these hooks written in scheme and loaded at
run time would be very useful. It would make it easier to plug in
various other tools without having to recompile.
-Dan
