Welcome to Schim's documentation!¶
Schim = SCHematic IMproved¶
Schim is a tool used to create electrical schematics, mainly for industrial applications. It aspires to become the standard open source tool for this purpose.
- An Open Source Tool
There is already a de facto standard application for drawing electrical diagrams called EPLAN, but it is proprietary. Also, there is QElectroTech which is a laudable attempt to make an open source alternative and it has been a very useful tool to me. But, it has made a lot of design decisions which I do not agree with and it lacks functionality. Also, it seems the bulk of its development consists of translations these days. Another dealbreaker for me is that its documentation is mainly in French, which I do not speak.
- With The Best of IT
Schim aims to bring the best of IT to industry. This includes open source, the Unix philosophy - primarily the "programs that work together" part, Git and any other tools you want. It includes a rich CLI interface, because what good is a program if it can't be automated using scripts? Also, a major pet-peeve of mine, virtually all software used in industry is completely proprietary. This means that they mostly use encrypted binary files. This is so irritating because you cannot use other tools to edit files in these projects and can't utilize Git to its full potential. Therefore, you are constrained by the feature-set of the proprietary software and can't modify it. Schim operates with files that are human readable and uses a project directory structure, which allows you to tweak those files with any tools you can muster.
- Designed for Productivity
It is also designed to maximize productivity. As the name might suggest, it also has Vim-like key mappings! However, it can be used as a normal application without those mappings.