kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Henner Zeller <h.zeller@xxxxxxx>]

Hi,
Choosing components in the schematics editor is very cumbersome right now.

Some examples:
  - Search does a substring search, then shows a list of components that have
    that substring. If you search for a capacitor 'C' or resistor 'R', this is
    somewhere in a huge list you have to scroll through as the alphabetically
    list has it somewhere in the middle.

  - The search-result is a separate window that distractingly pops up. If there
    was no match, no selection happens and we're silently dropped back in the
    schematic editor. If you don't know the exact term you have to search for or
    have typos, these round-trips are very frustrating.

  - Keyword search is a separate button. Why not part of the search ?

  - It is almost impossible to discover components that are in the
library, as the
    search and refine is not interactive and give very little clue about
    description and keywords.

Anyway, for me as a new user, this is very painful (probably you can get
used to it, but it will still slow you down).

So I sat down and thought about how it _should_ be.

This is what I came up with, see patch:

  - interactive search-as-you-type: a text input in which you can refine a
    query by adding search terms and see the result-list narrow down.
    The best match is at the top and can just be accepted with 'enter'.
    (No wildcards necessary, just type space separated terms)

  - Scoring: the 'best' match is in the front. A search for 'C' or 'R'
brings up the
    capacitor or resistor to the very top as it is an exact match for a
    component in the library. Prefix-matches are scored higher than
    substrings etc. This will give you most components you search for with
    a couple of key-strokes interactively narrowing down the search.

  - Matches in Keywords and descriptions are part of the same search.

  - The result list contains part of the description of the component, for the
    selected component, the full description and keywords are shown. This
    helps to better choose components.

  - The 'history' functionality is very similar to like before, it is
just a toplevel
    node (always unfolded) in the tree. It is improved as the last used
    component is pre-selected, so you can just get it with 'enter'.

  - In general, it is easy to operate this dialog with the keyboard for quick
    results.

There is another feature I'd like to add in a separate patch: show a little
drawing of the currently selected component in the left bottom corner
(left blank right now) when selected with the mouse popping up the library
viewer. I left it as a dummy in this patch as I didn't want to make it too big.

Also choosing a sub-gate should be possible as well, but is not handled
in this ui yet.

Anyway, just try it: patch this into your local source and play with it.
For instance, you want to see all flip-flops the 74er series has to offer ?
Your search term would narrow it down with '74 flip'. Press 'enter' to
select or navigate with the cursor keys to select the right one.
Search for a PLL in the 40er series ? Search for 'pll' (top result, just press
'Enter' to select) or 'pll 40' to exacly narrow down to a single component.

I tried to follow all style guide parts and let uncrustify have a look as well,
so the patch should be fairly 'clean' regarding the style-guide.
Please be gentle with a newcomer-patch :)
Of course, you might have suggestions - let me know what to improve.
(Feature tweaks are probably better handled in smaller followup patches)
The patch looks quite big, but this is mostly due to wxbuilder-generated code.
But I should probably stop adding more stuff to it and iterate from here.

View patch here:
https://github.com/hzeller/kicad/compare/master...component-chooser-experiment#files_bucket

Download it here:
https://github.com/hzeller/kicad/compare/master...component-chooser-experiment.diff

Thanks,
  -henner