kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Brian Sidebotham <brian.sidebotham@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 7 February 2014 10:31, jp charras <jp.charras@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Le 07/02/2014 09:22, Henner Zeller a écrit :
>> Hi,
>> While moving a field text (REFERENCE, VALUE and such) in the
>> schematic, it is possible to loose the visual sight to which component
>> it belonged to, in particular in tight spaces (which is typically the
>> time when you need to start moving labels around). At least once I
>> swapped the visual designators with different components .. creating a
>> mess.
>>
>> So while moving such a label, I think it would be good if there was a
>> visual indicator to which component that label belongs to -- a simple
>> line would do. This would only be drawn while moving is in progress;
>> see attached image how this could look like.
>>
>> I have prepared a patch that does that (the image is done with this patch):
>> https://github.com/hzeller/kicad/compare/master...show-belongs-to-edge-while-moving-labels
>>
>> As the way to draw differs for not-moving vs. moving (there is an
>> additional line), the very first draw operation with XOR doesn't make
>> sense, as the line hasn't been there before. Likewise the opposite
>> when stopping moving. So here I keep a little state in the SCH_FIELD
>> component that keeps track if the _last_ draw operation was seeing
>> IsMoving(). I haven't found if there is a better way within the
>> framework to better get informed about these transitions. If so,
>> please point me how to implement that more elegantly.
>>
>> And as usual, here the patch download link:
>> https://github.com/hzeller/kicad/compare/master...show-belongs-to-edge-while-moving-labels.diff
>>
>> cheers,
>>  -henner
>
> Good idea.
> This feature was existing in Pcbnew, but not in Eeschema.
> May I ask you to have a look to our coding style policy
> (see Documentation/coding_style_policy.pdf) before submitting a patch.
>
> Thanks for your interest in Kicad.
>

This is a great feature, thanks for your interest Henner!

Best Regards, Brian.