I am very happy to see that LTspice is so well supported and that recently many useful and timely updates have occurred to the product. It is very confidence building, regarding the future of a great 'free' tool.
I hope to bring to attention a little 'bugbear', that has been around for many years and that has created a great deal of noise on various forums. It relates to the need to re-name a customized component that makes use of a subckt. There is the symbol attribute, which can be added to an .asy file:
SYMATTR InstName [X]
Where [X] can be defined to match the requirements of the specific component. However this option is not available from the GUI for a symbol with a Prefix X as required for a subckt. This is quite frustrating and time consuming as each time a new symbol is created that need to be displayed using anything other than InstName 'U', this SYMATTR must be manually added to the .asy file. Furthermore, if the symbol is modified at some point inside the GUI,, for example to add a new pin to an subckt definition, as LTspice saves the modified .asy file, it overwrites the SYMATTR, which must be then subsequently manually edited and added back into the file. There is not doubt this is frustrating and in my case it leads to inconsistently named components on schematics. Which then leads to further problems for us as we use scripts to parse the .asc files in order to import schematics into Altium.
I realize that such 'nice to haves' are not the primary driver for LTspice and we are all very grateful that Analog Devices continues to make LTspice free to use. However if it is possible to add this feature into the GUI as part of the ongoing improvements. I for one would be most grateful.
All the very best.
Aidan Walton
