The most important improvements in version 6 of CleWin include:
- CleWin 6 uses DirectX to draw the layout on the screen. This allows the use of a transparent overlay to show the coordinates, mark selected objects, and highlight grid points and snap positions. Also the rulers are now partially transparent so that the layout is still visible underneath.
- The scroll bars in the layout window only appear if the mouse is at the right edge or bottom edge of the window.
- If a layout window is maximized while other layout files are open, tabs will appear at the bottom of the window to allow switching to one of the other files. In previous versions of CleWin the Window menu had to be used for this.
- The user interface has been modernized for Windows 10 and 11, and updated to support high resolution screens and high-DPI scaling. The various user interface styles in CleWin 5 are replaced by 4 light and 4 dark styles with an option to automatically adjust the style to the selected Windows theme. Switching from a light to a dark style will automatically switch the background in layout windows from white to black, and vice versa, but this can be overruled using the View|Background menu.
- The symbol treeview is now part of the main window and its contents are automatically adjusted to the currently active layout, similar to the layers panel. This allows placing the treeview and layers panel at the same side of the window to maximize the available screen area. Furthermore, the mode selector can now be placed directly at the edge of the layout window to minimize the required mouse movements when selecting another mode.
- The help system has been updated to the eWriter eBook format to replace the obsolete CHM format.
- Faster rendering of designs with an extremely large symbol hierarchy. There may also be somewhat faster rendering because of the use of DirectX, however for most designs this will not be noticeable.
- In CleWin 6.0.10 an Objects panel was added, which contains a list of all objects in the currently active symbol and can be used to selectively show or hide specific types of objects.
- A new boolean library “Clipper2” was added, resulting in improved performance of the Merge, Intersect, Subtract, and XOR commands.
- Besides this there are many small improvement and bug fixes, e.g. the possibility of opening multiple files simultaneously from File Explorer, file open and close buttons in the library panel, etc..
The most important improvements in version 5 of CleWin included:
- Drawings of designs on the screen is made much faster.
- Define and store 10 grid settings and activate these grids by pressing one of the numerical keys ‘0’…’9′. There is also the possibility, besides the grid size, of changing the color of the grid and choosing between dots, small crosses and large crosses.
- When editing a symbol definition, CleWin5 can now show the contents of parent and neighboring symbols semi-transparently in the background. This is CleWin’s better alternative to in-place editing. Symbol definitions are edited in their local coordinate system and the inverse transformation is applied to the parent and neighboring symbols in order to connect to easily aligned other symbols.
- New primitive objects are added: ‘Trapezoids’, ‘Regular polygons’ and ‘Circular arcs’.
- An unlimited ‘Redo’ command was added to the existing ‘Undo’ functionality.
- Panning of the window is now possible in all edit modes by using the right mouse button. In version 4 this only was possible in the ‘Zoom’ mode. Furthermore, because of the faster rendering, the entire image now moves while panning.
- The arrow keys can be used to pan the visible area, while drawing or editing objects.
- The resolution has changed from 1 nanometer to 1 picometer. The earlier limit of 1 nanometer was due to an internal representation of coordinate value by 32-bit numbers.
- The boolean operations ‘Merge’, ‘Intersect’, ‘XOR’ and ‘Subtract’ can also be used as drawing mode, i.e. while drawing new objects those are directly combined with objects that are already present.
- The ‘Duplicate’ command can now generate regular arrays, duplicate along the circumference of a circle and duplicate along a straight line.
- Align commands were added to align objects with respect to each other.
- Most dialogs for editing object properties are improved (e.g. for rectangles it is now possible to choose between entering two opposite corners or entering one node and the rectangle’s width and height).
- Selection of colors and fonts has been simplified.
- A ‘Maximize work area’ command has been added to allow full screen operation of CleWin.
With CleWin version 5.3 a fully 64-bit version of the program was introduced. Furthermore, rendering to the screen has been redesigned and now uses parallel threads to fully exploit the potential of modern processors with multiple cores. In version 5.4 Python was added as scripting language.