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Yellow cursor that shadows mouse pointer in schematic editor

johancsi

In the Virtuoso schematic editer, there is a yellow cursor that follows the tip of the mouse pointer and stays on the current grid snap spacing.  The yellow cursor is usally a small square, but changes to a representation of a symbol when placing an instance.  Are there skill functions available to be able to manipulate the yellow cursor and be able to change its shape or even its position?  I have looked through every function reference that I can find, and searched through these forums and other places with no luck.  I would also be happy if I could find a way to draw a temporary shape such as the yellow cursor in an arbitrary location in the window that I can move around.

 What I am trying to do is create a specialized instance placement tool that will only allow instances of cells to be placed in specific locations other than on the current grid snap.  I want to be able to calculate the appropriate locations in my skill code, and have my custom yellow box jump to the closest calculated location that mouse pointer is near.  This is just for visual verification of where the actual symbol will be placed when the mouse button is clicked.

 Thanks for any help

 

  • skillUser

    Hi,

    You can modify the cursor using hiSetCursor() or hiSetEFunCursor(), but this does not allow you to draw the cursor shape at any arbitrary location.  There is a function to get the current pointer location (hiGetPoint()). There is a private function for moving the pointer to a location. Perhaps you can play with the gravity and aperture settings?

    Regards,

    Lawrence. 

  • johancsi

    Hi Lawrence,

     Thank you for the response.  This morning I started playing around with hiSetCursor() and hiSetEFunCursor() as you suggested, and it doesn't behave like I would like it to.  Here is a small test procedure that I wrote to try changing the cursors and using hiGetPoint().

      procedure( cursortest()
       cwID=getCurrentWindow()
       hiSetEFunCursor(cwID 2)
       hiSetCursor(cwID hicHand)

       prog(()
          while( t
             loc = hiGetPoint(cwID)
             printf("%L\n" loc)
             if( loc && car(loc) < 0
                return()
             ) ; if
          ) ; while
       ) ; prog
    ) ; procedure

    If I run the procedure with the mouse pointer over the target schematic window, I see the hand pointer briefly before the mouse pointer turns into the waiting square with the dot moving from corner to corner.  Apparently it does this when any procedure is running which makes it kind of hard to override the mouse pointer from within a procedure.  When I exit the program by moving the mouse pointer to a negative x coordinate, as programmed in my procedure, the mouse pointer changes back to the hand.

    The other issue is that it seems that hiSetEFunCursor() is not doing anything.   I can't find any documentation on hiSetEFunCursor().  Is hiSetEFunCursor() used for changing the yellow square or symbol that shadows the mouse cursor?

    By the way, I am using IC615.  I forgot to mention that in my first post.

     

    Thanks

    Tracy

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