The Expand Button: Expand Subcells

The Expand button in the View Menu, and the View menu of sub-windows, brings up the Expand pop-up, which controls the expansion of subcells in the window. All geometry is shown in an expanded cell, whereas only the bounding box and possibly a name label are shown in the unexpanded state. If the cell happens to be an array, the bounding box in the unexpanded state is shown as a dashed line. Ordinary instances have a solid line bounding box.

The label shown in unexpanded physical instances is by default the instance name, which consists of the master name followed by a colon separator and an index number. The index is a 0-based sequence for instances with a particular master. The index count advances by the size of the array for arrayed instances, leaving room in the sequence for individual elements. The index is in database order (top to bottom then left to right of the upper left corner of the instance bounding box), and is stable and reproducible as long as instance sizes and placement locations remain the same. If the boolean NoInstnameLabels variable is set, the label will display the master name only, which was the behavior in Xic releases prior to 4.3.3.

After pressing Expand, the pop-up appears. The pop-up contains a text entry area, a number of buttons which push specific text into the entry area, an Apply button, a Dismiss button, and a Help button. When the pop-up first appears, it is given the keyboard focus. Under most (if not all) window managers, one should be able to type into the text entry area immediately. Pressing the Enter key is equivalent to pressing the Apply button. Thus, one can quickly change the expansion status entirely with the keyboard accelerators (the change will apply to the window containing the pointer).

For example, the default keypress mapping applies Ctrl-x to the Expand button, so typing

Ctrl-x 0 Enter

will set the expansion level to 0, and

Ctrl-x a Enter

will set the expansion level to ``all''.

The functions of the symbols which are recognized in the text string will be described below. The buttons which push text into the entry area avoid the need for typing. These are:

+	set to `+ ' (there can be multiple + 's added)
-	set to `- ' (there can be multiple - 's added)
All	set to `all'
0-5	set to `0' - `5'
Peek Mode	set to `p' (available from main window only)

Pressing the Apply button will pass the expansion string to the internal expansion control function.

The characters which are recognized in the string are the letters a, n for ``all'' and ``none'', one or more + or - symbols (not mixed) which will increment or decrement the hierarchy depth of expansion, a + or - followed by an integer, which will increase or decrease the level by that integer, or simply an integer, which will set the hierarchy depth to that integer. Setting the hierarchy depth to zero is the same as ``none''. All subcells up to the hierarchy depth are shown expanded.

Each drawing window has its own expansion parameters and Expand button. When a sub-window is created, it inherits the expansion status of the main window. The expansion depth entered applies only to that window.