Re: ngspice GUI?

[Christopher Howard]

> According to ngspice documentation, it doesn't have a GUI. There are
> many GUIs you can use though.

Properly speaking, ngspice does not have a GUI to drive commands. However, 
ngspice comes with a "plot" command, which per this tutorial, is supposed to 
make a graph appear in a graphical window.

https://ngspice.sourceforge.io/ngspice-tutorial.html

With some more investigation last week, I determined that ngspice has a 
--with-x option, and I believe that the ngspice package in Guix is not using 
the option. However, I tried building ngspice myself using this option and I 
quickly ran into a build error, related to it not being able to find an an Xaw 
library. Even with -D libxaw, configure reports "configure: error: Couldn't 
find Xaw library". So, perhaps the package was simply unable to build ngspice 
--with-x.

I don't really care much about this now, though, as I figured out that 
ngspice's "plot" command can be replaced by a similar "gnuplot" command which 
causes the same graph to be constructed with gnuplot. This works well most of 
the time. However, "gnuplot" command does require an extra argument (specifying 
the image file to save to) and it doesn't handle axis ranges in quite the same 
way, so "gnuplot" is not quite a drop-in replacement for "plot" in tutorials.

-- 
Christopher Howard