kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Brian Sidebotham <brian.sidebotham@...>]

Hi,

I have been looking at doing a patch to allow a list of default field
names to be defined for eeschema's libedit.

Problem: When creating new components with additional information,
such as ordering codes and manufacturer part numbers, etc. you will
currently need to edit the field names yourself for every component.
This can quickly become tiresome.

You could start with a blank part that has been saved to a library
with the field names defined, but this means that you cannot use the
New Component mechanism in libedit to create a new component.

Proposal 1: Would be for me to do a couple of patches to eeschema to
add this support to the project file structure:

(a) Add Default Field Name support in the project file (e.g.
DefFieldName0=Manufacturer, etc.)
(b) Add Editing of the default field names in the GUI.


Proposal 2: Would be to use a default .sym (single component) file,
much like the standard kicad.pro file that is distributed with KiCad
for the default project settings. This would allow someone to edit any
of the component attributes, and would be more in keeping with how
KiCad currently handles it's default values.

Does anyone have any preferences, or other ideas?

I think that proposal 2 is probably better for the project as it
offers more potential functionality without the need to repeat a lot
of these settings in the kicad.pro template file. Any changes to the
symbol structure will also be immediately reflected in this file
without the need to add more handlers to the project file structure.

Best Regards,

Brian.