Ergonomic Extras

Scroll Wheels

Users with a scroll wheel mouse have some extra one-handed operations options available which correspond to some functions found in the Toolbar.

Function	Shortcut
Scroll Right	Scroll_Wheel_Up
Scroll Left	Scroll_Wheel_Down
Find Previous Edge	Alt+Scroll_Wheel_Up
Find Next Edge	Alt+Scroll_Wheel_Down
Zoom In	Control+Scroll_Wheel_Up
Zoom Out	Control+Scroll_Wheel_Down

Turning the scroll wheel is far faster than pressing the navigation buttons. Zoom functions are especially smooth this way.

The Primary Marker

The primary marker has also had function overloaded onto it for user convenience.

Besides being used as a marker, it can also be used to navigate with respect to time. It can be dropped with the right mouse button and dragged to “open” up a region for zooming in closer or out farther in time.

It can also be used to scroll by holding down the left mouse button and dragging the mouse outside the signal subwindow. The simulation data outside of the window will then scroll into view with the scrolling being in the opposite direction that the primary marker is “pulling” outside of the subwindow.

Interactive VCD

VCD files may be viewed as they are generated provided that they are written to a fifo (pipe) and are trampolined through shmidcat first (assume the simulator will normally generate outfile.vcd):

mkfifo outfile.vcd
cver myverilog.v &
shmidcat outfile.vcd | gtkwave -v -I myverilog.sav

You can then navigate the file as simulation is running and watch it update.

Attention

Deprecated and will be removed in GTKWave 4.