kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Tomasz Wlostowski <tomasz.wlostowski@xxxxxxx>]

On 09.10.2015 13:27, Markus Hitter wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> I'm new to this list and there are apparently no searchable list
> archives, so I hope it's not too much to simply ask.
> 
> 
Hi Markus,

Usability is a major concern for us. Kicad has a lot UI quirks that made
it look and feel radically different from other tools and discouraged
new users from joining us.

We created an UI improvement blueprint page [1] and we encourage you to
contribute to this proposal.

> In search of best practices I currently read a lot of documentation and
> also visit forums. One pretty obvious thing is that the learning curve
> for editing is apparently high. Behaviour of the Cairo canvas differ
> substantially from the OpenGL canvas and neither of them is in alignment
> with human interface guidelines of the respective OS platform. This
> leads to confusion, even experienced users miss procedures as simple >
deleting a track:
>
> https://forum.kicad.info/t/kicad-opengl-is-painful-to-use/1262/27


The GL canvas is a work in progress and it's missing some features, and
some others are not polished up yet - that's why we are keeping the old
canvas for the moment.

Track deletion is of course supported, but it works more like in
mainstream software - select the item and press Delete. I think the main
complaint was that deletion doesn't work while the "Route" tool is
active - you need to exit the router tool by pressing Esc to
select/move/delete items. This behaviour is not our invention, we just
followed the practice of other big SW packages (MS Office,
Corel/Inkscape, Altium, Cadence). It can surely cause confusion of old
Kicad users - and we will probably enable the legacy behaviour as an
option, as soon as the stable release is out.


Best,
Tom

[1] http://www.ohwr.org/projects/cern-kicad/wiki/UI_improvements