[Timot05]

We do agree. We built an early version of a viewer in the project but later moved away from it because it wasn't good enough to interact with. We might come back to it with something that is more targeted at inspecting only sections of the circuit or provide a block diagram level representation. But we don't think that just outputting a schematic the way they look today is the right solution.

[whartung]

I worked on this for a little while myself.

It wasn't so much "pc board by code" so much, but it was more a "pc board by CLI" approach.

And by that what my goal was, was to offer primitives and utility functions that would build the board up over time, but it was to be done incrementally in a Lisp REPL.

My use case scenario, was ancient AutoCAD.

Back in the day, while you could hook up a tablet or other pointing device (I'm talking pre-mouse here) to make AutoCAD drawings, a lot of it was done simply through typing in commands, in AutoLISP.

(lineto 100 100) kind of thing. And the drawing would appear on the screen over time, you'd save the data model, and manipulated with the REPL. If you wanted 10 lines:

    (dotimes (i 10) (let ((x (* i 10)) (y 100)) (line x y x (+ y 100)))

(HN does not have a paren matching editor, apologies...)

Where it broke down for me was coming up with a graphic rendition using CL.

If emacs had anything reasonable regarding graphic support (its SVG support is Not Good), I'd have done it there.

Rethinking it, it just occurred to me I could have probably gone a good way using ABCL in a Java GUI shell.

But the key point is that I think using a REPL for building up something like a circuit can actually work, actually be efficient for users, especially if it's extensible (i.e. (defun grid ...) ). Especially a hybrid (like clicking on a line pastes an identifier into the REPL).

My experiences with KiCAD drove me down that mad hole.

[techdragon]

You might find this a stumbling point for adoption. My first thought is this could be a good tool for me to use, but how can I send a design to someone else to get feedback on if I’m not going to expect them to also also learn how to use this or how can I get my design manufactured if the tools can’t export out the, normally very visual, layout files.

[Timot05]

I do think that is fair. The reason that we don't have a visualizer is not that we don't want one, but rather that the value to effort ratio is quite low (and really because the effort is high, not because of low value). I'm sure we'll get there at some point. But at the moment there are more pressing issues for the people who are ok dealing with no visualization (like typing, language server, equations etc...).

[techdragon]

I’d definitely consider not letting some basic visual schematic outputs fall too far down the priority list.

A lot of existing EE is basically just the visual diagrams and a lot of existing EE people will expect the tools to give them the visual diagrams they work with somehow… like even just including the compiled schematic as an SVG in with the compiled outputs of netlist, gerber, etc… something that other software can be used to convert to PDF without extra complexity in your tool and can be used to interoperable with the existing talent pool of EE people who have not just no idea how to use your tool… but know how to read typical style circuit diagrams.