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announcing eeshow (schematics renderer and viewer)

 

I mentioned it on this list before, but here is a more formal
announcement:

In the Neo900 project we're faced with having to maintain complex
schematics that are edited by several people and that are kept in a
git repo. To keep track of each other's work (and sometimes one's
own) and to resolve conflicts, it is often necessary to compare
different versions.

Unfortunately, textual diffs are often hard to interpret, and making
visual diffs is difficult, in part also because of eeschema's lack of
non-interactive plotting.

So I decided to spend a couple of days to write a little tool to plot
Eeschema schematics from the command line. One month flew past, and
now I have an interactive viewer :-)

The viewer also makes it easy to hop around in the git history.
Eeshow is still far from being perfect, but I think it's good enough
for a reasonable first impression.

Eeshow is a collection of three tools, the interactive viewer eeshow,
and the command-line only tools eeplot and eediff. It is written in C
and runs on Linux using Gtk+ 3 and Cairo.

The code lives here:
https://neo900.org/git?p=eeshow;a=summary

I've prepared a little walk-through that shows the main features of
the GUI:
https://neo900.org/stuff/eeshow/

Some more examples for use from the command line, and also with other
projects than Neo900:
https://neo900.org/git?p=eeshow;a=blob;f=DEMO

For the future, I plan to work my way through the "to do" list
https://neo900.org/git?p=eeshow;a=blob;f=TODO
especially adding better support for projects spanning multiple
repositories (e.g., board design on one, libraries in another) and
handling of renamed files, fix bugs and memory leaks, and clean up
things a little.

Feedback welcome.

- Werner


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