Qucs-S: Quite universal circuit simulator with SPICE
About Qucs-S
Qucs-S provides a fancy graphical user interface for a number of popular circuit simulation engines. Qucs-S contains instruments for schematic capture, visualization and provides differents passive and active components including device library. The following simulation kernels are supported:
- Ngspice (recommended)
- Xyce
- SpiceOpus
- Qucsator (non-spice)
See the https://ra3xdh.github.io/ for more details. Qucs-S is based on original Qucs code: https://github.com/Qucs/qucs
Donation
Qucs-S accepts donation using Boosty platform: https://boosty.to/qucs_s
Build instructions
Use CMake to build Qucs-S. Install all necessary dependencies: GCC, Qt, Flex, Bison and SPICE
(optional). Install ngspice that is not needed for build, but serves as the simulation kernel.
Dependencies
Qucs-S requires Qt6 libraries including QtCharts, CMake, flex, bison, gperf, and dos2unix as compile time dependencies. Install these packages using the package manager of your distribution before compiling Qucs-S. Ngspice is not required at compile time, but it is required as runtime dependency to run the simulation.
Here are some examples for the popular Linux distributions.
Ubuntu or Debian
sudo apt-get install ngspice build-essential git cmake flex bison gperf dos2unix
sudo apt-get install qt6-base-dev qt6-tools-dev qt6-tools-dev-tools libglx-dev linguist-qt6
sudo apt-get install qt6-l10n-tools libqt6svg6-dev libgl1-mesa-dev qt6-charts-dev libqt6opengl6-dev
Fedora
sudo dnf install gcc-c++ cmake git flex bison gperf dos2unix ngspice
sudo dnf install qt6-qtbase-devel cmake qt6-qtsvg-devel qt6-qttools-devel qt6-qtcharts-devel
Compiling
After installing the dependecies, clone this git repository and execute in the top directory:
git submodule init
git submodule update
mkdir builddir
cd builddir
cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/your_install_prefix/
make
make install
Since the v25.1.0 the Qucs-S will be configured with Qt6 by default. Substutute the /your_install_prefix/
as desired installation directory. Substitute any desire path (for example $HOME/qucs-s) here.
You may omit this option and installation steps. Default installation directory will be /usr/local if
CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX is not defined.
Qt5/Qt6 support
Qt5 support has been dropped since v25.1.0. Only Qt6 libraries are supported. Set the WITH_QT6=ON
cmake flag if compiling the Qucs-S versions before v25.1.0
Running
Then run qucs-s executable to launch the application:
cd /your_installation prefix/bin
./qucs-s
clangd LSP support
Clangd looks for compile_commands.json file in parent folders of the file it processes.
compile_commands.json should be generated along with other build configuration files
when you run cmake as part of building routine:
mkdir builddir
cd builddir
cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/your_install_prefix/
If compile_commands.json is already there, create a symbolic link to it from project root dir:
cd project_root
ln -s ./builddir/compile_commands.json compile_commands.json
It may take some time to index files at first run. Clangd configuration is in .clangd file.