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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