Features Reference

This document provides a detailed reference for the advanced tools available in the Schematics Editor.

1. Tools and the canvas

The tool model

Every drawing tool is a one-shot action, not a mode. After a tool commits something it hands the canvas back to Select, so your next click manipulates what you just made.

• Tool lock (Q): pins the active tool so it stays selected after each commit. Use it for repeat drawing. The Lock tool button in the Edit toolbar mirrors the shortcut.
• Escape: always cancels an in-progress draw and returns to Select.
• Space: temporarily activates the Hand tool for as long as you hold it, then restores the tool you were using. Middle-mouse drag pans from any tool.

Cursors

The cursor tells you what a drag from the current position will do.

Canvas background

The Background group in the Edit toolbar sets the page colour: a picker plus presets (White, Paper, Blueprint tint, Slate, Ink, Transparent). This is a document property, not an editor theme, so it travels with export, save and round-trip, and it undoes. Dark mode remains a separate editor setting.

The page versus the surface

#_canvasBg is the page: the printable area and the export viewport. The surface around it is unbounded. You can draw outside the page, it simply will not export. New Canvas sets the page size.

2. Wiring and Connectivity

The Schematics Editor features a sophisticated connectivity engine specifically designed for electrical and logical diagrams.

Manhattan Routing (Wire Tool)

The Wire tool (W) uses Manhattan routing, which ensures that connections only use horizontal and vertical lines with 90 or 45-degree bends.

• How to use: Click a starting point, click to add anchor points, and double-click or press Enter to finish. Backspace retracts the last point.
• Smooth Bends: Toggle the Smooth button in the toolbar to switch between sharp 90-degree corners and 45-degree chamfered bends.
• Alt+click a wire: branches a new wire from that point.

Editing an existing wire

Select a single wire and it shows node handles instead of a bounding box: a larger circle at each end, a smaller one at every bend. Drag any of them to reshape the wire. Dropping an endpoint on a pin anchors it there; dropping it on empty canvas releases the anchor.

Cutting a wire

Double-click a wire to cut it at that point. A wire is one electrical run from connected pin to connected pin, so cutting produces two complete runs, each terminating in a connector node. The cut preserves every bend you drew. It never re-routes.

A symbol picker then offers to place a component at the cut. The far half keeps its open connector so you can attach it to the symbol's exit pin deliberately.

Cutting is only offered on polyline wires. A path containing curves or several subpaths cannot be expressed as a cut without redrawing it, so the editor declines rather than silently flattening your geometry.

Geometry is never re-routed behind your back

Moving or rotating a symbol re-anchors its attached wires: the affected endpoint follows the pin and its neighbouring vertex travels along the same axis, so an orthogonal wire stays orthogonal and every bend you placed survives.

Full re-routing is a command you invoke, never a side effect. Use Ctrl+Shift+L (Straighten Wires) when you want the router to redraw a selection.

Tracing and Highlighting

Use the Inspect accordion in the toolbar to analyze connectivity:

• Trace Mode (Toggle Switch): When ON, selecting a wire or component highlights every connected element in real time.
• Highlight Components: Highlights all symbols to distinguish them from background geometry.
• Show Connections: Renders a temporary netlist overlay showing logical connections between pins.
• Hovering a wire lights up its entire electrically connected net.

3. Labels: analysis and provenance

Inspect → Labels runs the geometry analysis and puts a chip on every analyzed element showing what the analysis decided it is. Click a chip to reclassify.

Reading a chip

The chip text is a shortcode; hover for the full class name.

The chip's colour is the provenance, meaning who decided this class:

Hovering a chip previews its element. Clicking selects it, flies the camera to it if it is off-screen, and opens the reclassify menu.

Corrections are recorded

Changing a class records what the recognizer had said alongside what you chose. The legend bar shows the split across the drawing and offers those corrections as a JSON export. A human correction outranks any later analysis re-run, so your decision survives every subsequent edit.

One analysis, every surface

Labels, the Layers Analysis view, ERC, the BOM/netlist and the Tags & Artifacts panel all read the same index. Reclassifying updates all of them, and re-runs ERC if its panel is open.

An element classified as a component but carrying no symbol is reported by ERC as classified-but-unnamed. The spec-driven rules (pin count, polarity, signal type) cannot run without a symbol, and would otherwise skip that element in silence.

4. Arrangement and Layers

Layer Management

Open the Side Panel and select the Layers tab.

• Tree View: all elements as a hierarchical list.
• Analysis View: elements grouped into semantic buckets (wires, connectors, modules, components, junctions) with a class dropdown on each row.
• Visibility (👁) and Locking (🔒) per element or group.
• Ordering: elements at the top render in front.

Clicking any row selects the element and flies the camera to it. The same is true of an ERC finding and a Labels chip.

Grouping logic

• Group (Ctrl+G) and Ungroup (Ctrl+Shift+G), with nested groups supported.

Selection and resizing

• Drag empty canvas to marquee. Elements that would be captured light up in cyan while you drag, so you can see the result before committing.
• Symbols and multi-selections always scale uniformly. A resistor squashed to 40% height is a wrong resistor, not a smaller one, and a non-uniform group resize deforms each member individually. Hold Shift to force uniform scale on anything else.
• Shift+R rotates 90°, Shift+F flips.

5. Precision and Measurement

Measure is a drawing tool, and its settings are separate from it.

Scale settings (set once)

The Scale group in the Edit toolbar holds the measurement unit and a Calibrate button. The 📏 button in the bottom toolbar opens the same dialog.

• Units: Pixels, Metric (mm, cm, m), Imperial (in, ft).
• Calibration: state how many pixels equal one unit, for example 100px = 25mm. The readout beside the dropdown always shows the active scale.
• Switching to px measures in raw canvas units and remembers your calibration for when you switch back.

Measuring

Activate Measure in the Edit toolbar. It behaves exactly like the Wire tool:

• Click to add points. A measurement can be a multi-segment route, not only a straight hop.
• Double-click or Enter finishes, Backspace removes the last point, Escape cancels.
• Click a wire to measure its full routed length and segment count in one action.
• Distance, angle and Δx/Δy update live as you move, before you commit.

A multi-point measurement gives a length per segment, the turn angle at each interior vertex, and a Σ total.

Measurements are part of the document

A finished measurement is a real annotation: it persists, serializes, exports and undoes. It is tagged as decoration so it can never enter the netlist as a wire.

• Select a measurement to get node handles, exactly like a wire.
• Drag a node to reshape it; every distance and angle recomputes.
• Double-click a measurement to add a node.
• Endpoints do not snap to pins, because a measurement is not electrically connected to anything.

6. View

• Zoom, Fit and Rotate are always available, including while something is selected.
• Space+drag or middle-mouse pans. The wheel zooms at the cursor.
• Reset View returns to a flat orientation at 100%.

The earlier 3D pitch and yaw transforms have been removed. They were applied as CSS transforms, which invalidated getScreenCTM() and put every selection handle in the wrong place. Zoom, pan and rotation are now pure SVG, so handle positions are always correct. Exported SVG is unaffected.