Can't use layers

Greetings Martin van den Nieuwelaar,

  on Fri, 14 Mar 2008 you wrote saying :

Really, when you can click and drag and find all the options you need

under a menu like any other windows based interface, why would you

bother to learn the extensive command line interface?

Because, as I keep having to tell people whose computer experience has

been crippled by Windows, the command line is very much faster and more

powerful for a lot of jobs. This doesn't just apply to Eagle - it's true

of lots of stuff from the *nix shell to text editors.

Sure, Eagle's command line by itself is a more awkward way to draw a

schematic than the drag-and-drop approach. But when drawing new

component packages in the library editor the mouse is a painfully slow

way to place 64 pads on a regular and well-defined grid. Since I have

some programming skill, it's much quicker for me to knock up a Python

script to auto-generate the command line instructions into a .scr file.

If I want to create (as I have several times recently) a whole family of

connectors, then this approach does it in half an hour. It would take

days to draw them all by mouse.

I have observed people using CAD tools of all sorts, and computers of

all sorts. In my experience, your "The GUI is BEST" cry is common among

inexperienced to intermediate users. True experts prefer the greater

power of a command line. Good software therefore provides both.

--

Rob Pearce                       http://www.bdt-home.demon.co.uk

The contents of this | Windows NT crashed.

message are purely   | I am the Blue Screen of Death.

my opinion. Don't    | No one hears your screams.

believe a word.      |

Greetings Martin van den Nieuwelaar,

  on Fri, 14 Mar 2008 you wrote saying :

Really, when you can click and drag and find all the options you need

under a menu like any other windows based interface, why would you

bother to learn the extensive command line interface?

Because, as I keep having to tell people whose computer experience has

been crippled by Windows, the command line is very much faster and more

powerful for a lot of jobs. This doesn't just apply to Eagle - it's true

of lots of stuff from the *nix shell to text editors.

Sure, Eagle's command line by itself is a more awkward way to draw a

schematic than the drag-and-drop approach. But when drawing new

component packages in the library editor the mouse is a painfully slow

way to place 64 pads on a regular and well-defined grid. Since I have

some programming skill, it's much quicker for me to knock up a Python

script to auto-generate the command line instructions into a .scr file.

If I want to create (as I have several times recently) a whole family of

connectors, then this approach does it in half an hour. It would take

days to draw them all by mouse.

I have observed people using CAD tools of all sorts, and computers of

all sorts. In my experience, your "The GUI is BEST" cry is common among

inexperienced to intermediate users. True experts prefer the greater

power of a command line. Good software therefore provides both.

--

Rob Pearce                       http://www.bdt-home.demon.co.uk

The contents of this | Windows NT crashed.

message are purely   | I am the Blue Screen of Death.

my opinion. Don't    | No one hears your screams.

believe a word.      |