How to group gates manually (and make circuit more readable)?

Question

I'm trying to make my circuit look readable, but the gates auto-order in Qiskit QuantumCircuit shifts all gates to the left side. For example an image from qiskit documentation:

It would be much better to put ancilla X gate into the first column, Hadamard gats into the second, controlled gates into the third-fourth-fifth, and last Hadamard into the sixth column.

Such a result may be achieved in Quirk

Is there a way to set up an explicit column number for the quantum gate in the Qiskit QuantumCircuit (or other class)?

Answer 1

You can use barriers to align the gates:

from qiskit import QuantumCircuit
circuit = QuantumCircuit(4)
circuit.x(3)
circuit.barrier()
circuit.h(range(4))
circuit.cx([0,1,2], 3)
circuit.h(range(3))
circuit.measure_all()
circuit.draw('mpl')

If you want to remove them from the plot:

circuit.draw('mpl', plot_barriers=False)