I really like the xschem with xyce workflow @Stefan Schippers it is super fast compared to ngspice. Inverter runs in <1 sec vs 23 in ngspice. A 3-bit DAC runs in <5 vs 29. Hspice using the sky130 version of https://github.com/lekez2005/open_pdks/releases needs about the same time. For larger circuits I use still use command line (eg. mpirun -np 6 Xyce DAC02_simulation.spice) so that I can see the status of the simulation and load the generated raw file afterwards. Is there a trick to show the simulation status? is it possible to automatically refresh the .raw data if a checkbox is checked after a succesful simulation? I can also submit these 2 questions +1 above about hspice as feature requests in the xschem github repo if you like.