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Comment by vasco | Hacker News Reader

This is the easiest and best way I've ever found to draw electrical circuits. Oh my god. So much components. I'm shaking in happiness for all the time I won't have to waste trying to fight inkscape & friends. (Not even mentioning latex packages to do this)

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Circuit lab (https://www.circuitlab.com/) is pretty good too.

(Note: I'm a developer of CircuitLab.) It used to surprise me to see just how common it was for people to use general-purpose drawing/diagramming tools for electronics. In fact, Inkscape plus copy+paste is the de-facto schematic tool of choice for the Wikipedia project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Electron... ! Nothing against Inkscape -- in fact, Inkscape is what we use to prepare symbols for insertion into CircuitLab -- but it really says something about how painful a lot of electronics-specific software must be that users will jump to general purpose vector drawing tools instead.

+1 for CircuitLab.

if you define 'painful' to be 'under powered, needlessly complex, and over priced.' then yes.

Single biggest feature asked for an NEVER delivered, 'solid way to export a schematic to web-useful format' (PNG, GIF, JPG, or SVG).

Feature request: hold down the space bar to get a drag cursor that moves the whole workspace around. (And ideally also hold spacebar + cmd to get a zoom in cursor, spacebar + option for a zoom our cursor.) These controls are used by every Adobe app (and have been widely adopted by other drawing/graphics software) and they’re amazingly useful, because they make it lightning fast to alternate between moving around the canvas and doing whatever else.

We've currently got Ctrl+Drag (or Cmd+Drag on OS X) for panning around the workspace, and the mouse wheel up/down is mapped to zooming in/out. (Probably need to better document these somewhere!) Compatibility with other keyboard/mouse conventions is something I will pass on to the UI team.

Agree about "amazingly useful ... lightning fast" to switch between modes -- we just added a keyboard shortcut for re-running the last simulation, just so we could eliminate the burden of explicit mode switching between schematic capture and simulation.

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