kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Werner Almesberger <werner@...>]

Dick Hollenbeck wrote:
> This one below is not intuitive:
> > - left-click on invisible layer makes it visible and selects it

Hmm, I think of it as a shortcut, particularly if your workflow
is to hide all the layers you're not working on. But it's not
essential to my proposal. You get the same functionality with
something like this:

Before	|	After
Visible Selected |	Visible Selected
N	N	|	Y	N
N	Y	|	Y	Y	(if this state exists)
Y	N	|	Y	Y
Y	Y	|	N	Y	(if N/Y state exists)

> http://groups.yahoo.com/group/kicad-devel/attachments/folder/55037520/item/1371988748/view

Thanks for the link ! Seems that Yahoo eats the attachments, so
I didn't see it before :-(

That doesn't look bad, but I think it takes up a lot of screen real
estate. (BTW, triple-head here, but usually with different things
going on on each screen.) Here's a rough draft of what I had in
mind:

http://www.almesberger.net/misc/kicad/layers.png

The design conventions would be:

- filled box in layer color means layer is visible, non-filled box
means it's invisible

- selected layer is marked with an outer frame (if you don't like
having two frames, perhaps a triangle "arrow" would work as well)

Thus the layers would be in the following state:

- Top: visible, not selected
- One: visible and selected
- Two: neither visible nor selected
- Bottom: neither visible nor selected

The information density is fairly high here, but it's also a system
that should be easy to explore, particulary if you add tooltips that
spell out what is there, e.g., "Inner_L1: visible, selected".

- Werner