kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Lorenzo Marcantonio <l.marcantonio@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Jun 13, 2014 at 07:00:48PM -0000, madworm wrote:
> No, please don't try to fix it. This is altogether evil.
> 
> The previous behaviour was very usable, the new way (as of now - BZR4942
> + either patch) is a waste of time.

I also think that for *group* operation the old behaviour is better. For
single components however it's useful to keep the cursor referred to the
insertion position, for alignment/gridding purposes (like when doing
modular terminal blocks; I have lots of them :D).

Anyway I wouldn't worry too much over this kind of feature... in
practice unless you have hugely sparse boards a rectangular selection is
not extremely useful (IIRC the block commands in pcbnew where added only
to center the board on the page). On some kind of circuit (these with
massive amount of passives, like analog filters and opamp cells) it can
be useful to make place for another row/column of components, but then
it's a precision move anyway (you either do it with space+mouse or
directly from the keyboard counting keypresses) so the anchor point
choice is less useful. YMMV it's a personal workflow/layout practice of
mine.

I personally would like something like the autocad move/copy (without
grips); select the things, from point, to point. Grips are more for
detailing work, like placing dimensions and such in a 'pleasing' way...
direct dragging is more for freeform drawing IMHO (board edges usually
need to match the enclosure or have some constraint, I never had the
privilege of saying "well, more or less it should be about this big"
:D). However with the space zeroing you can do precision work easily
anyway, so it doesn't matter.

-- 
Lorenzo Marcantonio
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