Re: Re-drawing problems with electric

[Steven Rubin]

> I just recently installed electric 6.02 on my linux box(running RH 7.0 with
> kernel 2.4.0 and GNOME), and I"m encountering some strange behavior.
>
> One problem is that when I create a second window with Facet->Edit Facet,
> the Component set changes. My first facet had the "schematic, digital" set,
> and I would like to use that set on my newly created facet as well. However,
> the set stubbornly refuses to be anything but "schematic, analog", even after
> attempting to change it through Technology->Change Current Technology. This
> makes editing rather difficult.

Electric automatically switches to the technology of the current facet.  If 
you placed digital schematic components in the other window, it would 
switch to the digital schematic technology.  However, you can disable the 
auto-switching in the "Facet Options" dialog.

> I also had a problem where making a second window would cause both windows to
> not redraw correctly. A white box would appear near the upper right of the
> screen, and any clicks on that would be treated likes clicks on my desktop
> background, regardless if there was a window underneath it or not. And
> sometimes, when one of the facet windows is raised, the portion which was
> covered would be blue and remain blue, without any refresh. These problems
> seem to happen most with the LessTif widget set.

I am unaware of this problem.  Is this box part of the edit window?

> One more problem I had with opening new windows was that sometimes the new
> window would open with a HUGE width, streching across and far off the end of
> all three of my desktops. My pager crashed because of its huge width. Is
> there something I can do to avoid this?

Electric automatically determines the size of a window from the extent of 
the desktop.  You might look at the module "graphunixx11.c" to prevent it 
from creating such a huge window.

> The documentation seems to imply that there is a sample library
> beyond the primitive set which comes with electric. Where can I get this
> library, and how can I use it?

The library is called "samples.txt" and is a "readable dump" file that 
comes with Electric.  It should be in the "examples" folder.

> Finally, I was wondering if there are any plans to add support for a different
> widget set to electric. Both LessTif and Athena, while functional, are really
> kind of an eyesore to me. I would really like to see support for either/both
>  the KDE widget set or the GTK widget set.

After Athena, LessTif, the Macintosh Toolbox, and Windows MFC, I'm pretty 
much burned-out on OS interfaces.  If you want an interface that looks good 
and works great, try the Windows port (I'm no fan of Microsoft, but I have 
to admit that Electric runs great under Windows).  Or you could add your 
favorite widget set.  Or you could contract it out (Static Free Software 
does this stuff).

    -Steven Rubin