Tips on refactoring a circuits design

[swindle]

I have a row of combinators (15), with a spaghetti of wires going between them. I would like to keep the circuitry the same but move the components around. Is there a way to move a combinator while preserving its connections? I didn't find a way to do so within the game. If it is not supported (OOB or using a mod), what are the tricks to make this easier?

At this time I copy the combinator and manually copy its connections from the old one. This is tedious and error-prone.

Bonus question: is there a tool that allows compiling an expression into a blueprint (VerilogHDL / VHDL style?)

[SoShootMe]

Is there a way to move a combinator while preserving its connections?

You can't in the base game but there is the Picker Dollies mod which is perfect for this.

Bonus question: is there a tool that allows compiling an expression into a blueprint (VerilogHDL / VHDL style?)

I have some recollection of discussion of such a tool in the forum but I couldn't quickly find it. I'm not sure how practical it would be (though it would be somewhat interesting).

[aka13]

https://github.com/un0btanium/FactorioScript
https://github.com/Jobarion/factoriogen

There are two actually, but I have not used either

[DaleStan]

There's also https://github.com/Redcrafter/verilog2factorio

The one time I used it, way back when, it wasn't very good at using the full capabilities of combinators, but that seems like a hard problem to solve.

At a glance, FactorioScript just packs together the specific combinators you want, while factoriogen (and verilog2factorio) lets you use more powerful programming constructs.