Forums » CircuitLab Feature Requests

I would like to have a checkbox right of the remove button on the simulation tabs to enable/disable an output for/from being plotted.

@errtee, in case you haven't found this function yet: if you click on a trace name in a plot window you can toggle the visibility of that trace.

That's won't have quite the same effect as selecting not to plot a trace as you are asking because the trace you wish to hide (not plot) may have some effect on the Y axis scaling of the whole plot. For example if you plot a 100V pk-pk sinewave and a 1V pk-pk sinewave on the same axes and then hide the 100V pk-pk sinewave then you will not see the 1V pk-pk sinewave clearly because the Y axis will have been scaled to fit the 100V signal and does not auto scale to fit the largest waveform remaining (1V) after the 100V trace has been hidden.

Elsewhere in the forums is a request to be able to rescale the Y axis to account for this:

https://www.circuitlab.com/forums/general-discussion/topic/mtney8h2/feature-request-option-to-auto-rescale-vertical-axes-when/

You can choose to plot the 100V and the 1V signals with different Y axes or even on different graphs if you wish:

https://www.circuitlab.com/blog/2012/04/07/advanced-graphing-powerful-plotting-options/

the documentation for plotting a graph says: ... In some cases, as you click around your circuit to select outputs, you may capture more outputs than you intended to. In this case, it's good practice to simply remove the expressions you aren't interested in to keep your plots clean.... and that is what I want to avoid, I just want to disable an expression so it can easily reuse it later

found a solution: just put a '#'-sign in front of the expression

Good idea but I don't think there's anything special about the '#' symbol.

I think you can achieve the same effect by doing anything that changes the expression to something that CL doesn't recognise. For example, if you had the expression

ABS(V(out)-V(in))

you could 'disable' it by editing it to:

xABS(V(out)-V(in))

or

ABS(V(out)-V(in))\

or

ignoreABS(V(out)-V(in))

Note that you're not really disabling the expression, you're just giving CL something it doesn't understand so CL ignores it. Fortunately, CL doesn't just throw an error and stop execution.