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General Visual

The following !set variables affect general visual attributes of Xic.

MouseWheel
Value: two floating-point numbers.
This variable controls the per-click increments for mouse wheel panning and zooming of drawing windows. Without a key held, the mouse wheel scrolls drawing windows up/down. If Shift is held, scrolling is right/left. If Ctrl is held (overrides Shift), the mouse wheel zooms out or in.

The string provided to this variable consists of two space-separated floating-point numbers, each in the range of 0 - 0.5. The first is the pan factor, the second is the zoom factor. The default is 0.1 0.1. Larger numbers increase the effect per mouse wheel click. If either number is set to 0, that effect (pan or zoom) is suppressed. Thus, to turn off mouse wheel support in drawing windows, give ``0 0''.

ListPageEntries
Value: integer 100-50000
This sets the number of entries that appear per page in the pop-ups that list cells. If the number of cells to be listed exceeds this number, a page menu will become visible in the listing panel. Each page will contain at most this number of entries. Only the entries for the currently selected page will be visible. If this variable is not set, the default value is 5000.

NoInstnameLabels
Value: boolean.
Starting in release 4.3.3, the label used in physical display windows for unexpanded cell instances is the instance name, which consists of the master cell name followed by a colon separator and a unique integer index. When this variable is set, the label shows the master cell name only, the same as in earlier Xic releases.

NoLocalImage
Value: boolean.
In Xic generation 3, a ``local image'' may be used to compose images for screen rendering. The display image is composed in local memory, and flushed to the screen when drawing is complete. When using X-Windows, this provides much faster rendering of complex displays, particularly when running remotely over a network, than the standard method of server-side image manipulation as used exclusively in previous Xic releases.

The local image method is not used under Windows, since it provides no benefit in the Windows architecture. It is also not used if the hierarchy being shown is not complex, i.e., contains few subcells and objects, as the conventional drawing mode is quicker in this case.

If this variable is set, the local image feature is disabled, and rendering is always performed by server-side functions. This is for debugging, it is not likely that the user will need to set this variable.

NoPixmapStore
Value: boolean.
In normal operation, the screen refreshes are buffered through an in-core pixel map. The geometry is rendered in the map, and when finished the map is copied to the screen. This is generally faster than drawing directly to the screen. When this variable is set, all drawing is direct to the screen. This is intended only for debugging purposes.

NoDisplayCache
Value: boolean.
In normal operation, boxes are cached during rendering, and displayed with a multiple object rendering call. This should be faster than rendering the boxes individually. When this variable is set, the caching is disabled. This is intended only for debugging purposes.

LowerWinOffset
Value: integer -16 to 16.
For windows that are automatically placed just above the prompt line, giving this variable a positive value will position these windows toward the top of the screen by that many pixels. This is useful when using ``plasma'' displays (such as Mac or KDE), where the shadow falls on the prompt line, which can be distracting. It might also be helpful if the window positioning is incorrect, which might occur with some window managers. This variable tracks the state of the Pixels between pop-ups and prompt line entry area in the General page of the Window Attributes panel from the Attributes Menu.

PhysGridOrigin
Value: two floating-point numbers.
This will set the origin of the displayed grid in physical-mode windows. The value consists of two floating-point numbers, which are taken as the x and y grid origin location in microns. This applies only to the displayed grid, and specifically not to the grid/snap used when creating or locating objects.

When an offset is active, the word "PhGridOffs" will be displayed in the status area.

ScreenCoords
Value: boolean.
When set, the coordinate readout area will display the position of the mouse pointer in the current drawing window in the window's pixel coordinates. This is for development/debugging purposes and is not likely to be useful to the user, and in fact may cause trouble if used while editing.

PixelDelta
Value: integer (default 3).
This variable determines how close, in screen pixels, a user must click to a feature for Xic to recognize this as clicking ``on'' that feature. The value should likely be set larger than the default for very high-resolution screens, or for inaccurate pointing devices, or for users with less than the sharpest eyesight.

NoPhysRedraw
Value: boolean.
When set, physical windows will not be redrawn after a layer visibility change in the layer table. This is traditional behavior of earlier Xic releases, which assumed that screen redraws would take some time and the user would prefer to force a redraw when desired.

NoToTop
Value: boolean.
By default, most if not all Xic sub-windows will automatically rise to the top if completely covered by the Xic main window. This includes plot windows from WRspice running under control of Xic (however most window managers don't support this). If this variable is set, the action will be disabled. This will apply to plot windows from WRspice that is started after the variable is set.

Some (probably most) window managers will do this automatically for sub-windows, in which case setting this variable will have no effect on the Xic sub-windows, but would still affect WRspice plot windows if the window manager supports this. The only window manager I know of that supports this is Exceed 2008, because it is old. The protocol is deemed a security risk and has been disabled in modern window managers for some time.


next up previous contents index
Next: Keyboard `!' Commands Up: Xic Variables Previous: Paths and Directories   Contents   Index
Stephen R. Whiteley 2024-09-29