Hello,
this is a suggestion following a question in the previous thread.
Often, when renumbering the parts of a circuit so that the part names
follow the structure or signal flow of the schematic, it's much work to
rename the parts manually in the desired order: you have to enter the
parts name completely, for every single part. It's also error prone,
since you easily mistype some detail.
Since EAGLE already has mechanisms to assign the next available/unused
part index to some part (when using ADD), it seems pretty obvious to
make this mechanism available for the user. That way, after having
renumbered the parts to some higher starting number (for which ULPs
exist), parts could be renumbered in any order by simply clicking them
one after another.
The related command could be "NAME AUTO" (or maybe "NAME NEXT"). It
should be rather simple to implement, since the underlying mechanism is
completely implemented already. As long as "NAME AUTO" is active, any
part clicked with the mouse should get a new name consisting of the
current prefix and the next free/unused index.
The command should be available in schematic, board and library editor
as well (think of renaming pads).
Tilmann