Avian’s Blog

Some time ago I did a short comparison between XCircuit and GSchem. At that time I was only using GSchem for a few days so I was a bit biased.

Now I have been using GSchem regularly for about 4 months and during that time I've used it to draw the complete schematics for Galaksija motherboard, its keyboard and also a number of smaller circuit. Since I now have quite a bit more experience with this application I feel I need to correct some of things I previously said about GSchem.

Usability

In my previous post I've mentioned that XCircuit's key bindings and overall work flow seems to be more efficient. I still agree with that. Moving and editing placed components is still awkward compared to XCircuit, even after you get used to it. For example, now I got used to delete a net and draw it again instead of trying to move its vertexes into the correct position.

I submitted a patch that makes some additional keyboard shortcuts possible (like panning with cursor keys, which is normal in XCircuit) and it got accepted to the official version. So this is now a bit better than 4 months ago. Still most keyboard shortcuts use two keypresses which I find a bit odd. This is configurable with some Scheme scripts however I'm a bit too lazy to do a complete overhaul of keyboard bindings (and I'm pretty sure such a change would not be appreciated by GSchem developers and other users)

Stability

CVS head version is quite stable and is perfectly usable for day-to-day work. Compared with some projects that break their CVS builds every few days this is very nice.

Component enumeration

This is still isn't working very well in the official version, but things should improve soon. I've submitted a patch with a new autonumbering dialog. It's not yet in the official version of GSchem, but I'm working with some gEDA developers to make it good enough to be merged with CVS head.

Symbol library

After working a bit with GSchem I found out that the symbol library included with the program is bit too inconsistent for my taste. There are for example different symbols for circuits from the 74 family that are drawn in a slightly different style. I ended up redrawing quite a lot of them to correct pin spacing, placing, symbol attributes, etc.

A bigger problem is that some symbols are using VDD and VSS global nets for supply and ground while some are using Vcc and Gnd. This isn't obvious when you are drawing the schematic (unless you check each symbol you place) but can cause a lot of confusion when you are drawing the PCB from the automatically generated netlist and some chips don't have ground connected.