kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Dick Hollenbeck <dick@...>]

FAQ:

How do I turn off layers?

This is one of the most widely asked questions we have experienced. The 
LAYER_WIDGET will help users with this question. For this reason, and 
the fact that I have 54" of screen real-estate available using two 28" 
monitors, I am coding the LAYER_WIDGET to be always visible. It will 
initially reside on far right, but you can tear it off and let it 
float. If others want to add support to show and hide it later, feel 
free to do so, but I insist that you also give me the ability to have it 
work the way I wrote it, which is to have it pop up visible and docked 
on the right.

Attached is a screen shot in full size. This will not likely fit on 
your screen unless your resolution is at least as large as mine but you 
can scroll around and get an idea of what a fairly high resolution video 
card and monitor will do for PCBNEW. (This is only 1/2 of the full 
screen that I have to work with.)




Observations and suggestions moving forward:

1) At this screen resolution, there is a lot of space being wasted in 
the toolbars. 

2) The "Clearance .." window is not fully visible, because the 
containing window it is too small for the font. I suggest a smaller 
font size for these windows. As a minimum, the code should size the 
window correctly, not just guess (wrongly).

3) The entire right side of the topmost toolbar is being wasted.

4) The Layer combox is soon to be obsoleted. (Should be removed, and 
maybe the 2nd topmost toolbar should be combined with the then smaller 
1st topmost toolbar.

5) Some of the stuff on the toolbars is not needed if we are paying for 
the "Render" tab real-estate anyway. For example "Grid", "Mod Text 
Hide", each have toolbar icons. There are more like this. A picture 
may be worth a thousand words, but these are not pictures, they are icons.

6) All the rows in my two tabs can each have their own tooltip text, 
which complements the already descriptive prompt text.

7) When the aux_right toolbar comes up, it takes up yet another layer of 
the onion. But on my screen it would easily fit in with the existing 
vertical right toolbar.

8) We should start suggesting and designing for a minimum screen 
resolution for users, and that resolution should be revisited each year 
and increased. 

9) We should soon transition to allow the wxAUI toolbars to be dockable 
OR floating. This would let users position the right vertical toolbar 
up on top, etc. When doing that, we need to retain the positions for 
the next program invocation. wxAUI has support for this that we are not 
yet using.

10) I will be happy to move onto other work and probably will not have 
time to do more on this UI work than I have already committed to do in 
the next day (which is to hook in the LAYER_WIDGET and make it fully 
functional.)


Dick

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