Tidying up

Lay the wires out again so none of them lies on another, and line the parts up on the breadboard grid.

A circuit you have been dragging about for half an hour ends up with jumpers stacked on one line, wires stapled across the board you are trying to read, and parts at four different heights. Two buttons put it right.

Tidy wires

Press T, or use the button beside the pen on the canvas toolbar, or Tidy wires in the canvas toolbar's more menu. With nothing selected it lays every wire out again; with wires selected it lays only those, and works around everything else as it finds it.

What it is looking for is the same thing a person points at:

• no two wires on one line. Runs that lie on top of each other, or that run closer than two grid units for long enough to read as one thick wire, get moved apart.
• no wire across a part. A jumper laid over a board, a display or a module hides the thing you are trying to look at, and one over a resistor or an LED is a smaller version of the same problem.
• no wire along a power rail. The rail's holes are what you count to find where something is plugged in, so a run keeps a clear unit off them.

Every wire keeps its two ends exactly where they are: Tidy chooses the corners between them, never what is connected to what. It leaves a wire that is already out of everybody's way alone, corners and all, so pressing it on a circuit you have laid out by hand does not undo your work. And it scores the result before it hands it over: if laying the wires out again would not improve the picture, nothing moves and it says so.

The whole thing is one step, so one Ctrl/Cmd+Z puts it back. In a live collaboration everybody sees it at once.

What it does not do

• It never moves a part, and never changes what is wired to what. A circuit that is a tangle because the parts are in the wrong places needs the parts moved first, then Tidy.
• A wire you have locked stays exactly where it is, and the others are laid around it.
• On a very crowded board it will sometimes leave one wire crossing a resistor rather than take it the long way around. It will tell you it could not improve things rather than make them worse.

Align

Select two or more parts and open Align in the selection panel. Eight little pictures: line their left edges up, their centers, or their right edges; their tops, their middles, or their bottoms; or spread them evenly across or down so the air between them is equal. Spreading needs three parts, since two are already evenly spread.

Everything lands on the breadboard grid, so a part whose pins were in holes is still in holes afterwards. The wires on a part you move follow it exactly as they do when you drag it by hand. A part held by a lock stays where it is, and the line is drawn on the parts that can actually move.

Like Tidy, one align is one undo step.

Tidy and the built-in circuits

The circuits in the templates gallery go through the same router as they are opened, so the picture you start from already meets the same bar. That is why pressing Tidy on one of them usually says there is nothing to do.