I just started learning QSPICE. The documentation is hard to read thru, and each explanation that I do find seems to assume a lot of existing knowledge that you don’t know what it’s called and therefore can’t search for it.
In any case, the current question is how to mirror a schematic symbol. I was trying to draw a current mirror, so wanted one of the transistors to be a mirror image of the stock symbol. If I hover in the right place and then right-click, I get a context menu that includes “orientation”. That only allows rotations, not mirroring. I searched for “mirror image” in the help and that showed that CTRL-M is supposed to do mirror imaging. However, I can’t figure out how to apply CTRL-M. I couldn’t get CTRL-M to do anything, regardless of what was hovered over or what context menu was up. The help is no help in this case.
Try this: With the component actively selected and being dragged, CTRL-E. (Actually, CTRL-M is the documented mirror key-combination. Both work and require that you’re dragging the object.)
Now where in the help does it explain this? I’m trying to RTFM, but the M isn’t making it easy, at least not for complete newcomers like me that don’t have any existing context. I’ve never used Spice or any other simulator before.
Well, to be honest, the GUI is pretty primitive. Lots of room for improvement. Can’t select “all inside a bounding box” vs “all touched by a bounding box.” Once objects are selected, can’t add/remove individual items to/from selection. For now, the big improvements are in simulation speed/accuracy and mixed mode support. Hopefully we’ll get GUI improvements eventually.
Shortcut of schematic can be found in Qspice HELP : QSPICE > Schematic Capture > Schematic Editor > Keyboard Shortcuts.
SPICE requires a certain amount of effort to get started.
To help the community, I wrote an entry guide (as well as other guides) and shared them on my GitHub, which you can download. Qspice/Guideline at main · KSKelvin-Github/Qspice
Yeah, having to type a key with CTRL while holding a mouse button with the other hand is awkward to say the least.
When I was trying to figure it out, it never even occurred to me that CTRL-M was supposed to be applied while dragging the part. I was expecting a more typical interface where you select the part or parts you want to modify, then subsequent commands apply to the selection.
I don’t know how one selects multiple parts this way. I tried clicking on them with SHIFT down, with CTRL down, dragging a rectangle, and a few other things, but none of them worked.