kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Jon Evans <jon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I am fairly new to the list so I didn't realize it had been widely
discussed already, sorry.
I understand your wariness about having lots of filter switches; it doesn't
seem ideal to me either.

My one concern with hover highlighting is that it almost always leads to
the need for disambiguation
when selecting something in a dense area with many stacked traces (etc.)
and so there is still
the need to make disambiguation less painful.

For me the disambiguation context menu really breaks the flow of selecting
things and working with them.
I'd rather the software guess at something and then let me correct the
guess.
In cases where there are only two options, that means the software has a
~50% chance of guessing the right thing!
If I could then use a hotkey to correct the guess, I wouldn't have to use
that key half the time,
and wouldn't be interrupted by the context menu in the times I did want to
use the hotkey.

On Thu, Nov 19, 2015 at 1:56 PM, Wayne Stambaugh <stambaughw@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

> This horse has been resurrected and beat to death many times with no
> clear solution.  I'm not terribly thrilled about the idea of having a
> bunch of filter switches.  Although I wouldn't completely rule it out if
> a better solution cannot be implemented.  The solution that was
> discussed in the past that seemed to get the most positive comments was
> to use hover highlighting so the user knows exactly which object is
> going to be selected rather than any type of disambiguation or
> filtering.  Whether or not we could effectively implement such a feature
> remains to be seen but I would prefer to give that a try first before we
> implement IMO a less elegant solution like filters which require a lot
> of user input.
>
> In the short term there are some minor changes that would improve the
> current situation.  The most annoying one to me is objects on hidden
> layers still show up in the disambiguation context menu and can get
> selected using the hotkeys.  When I turn a layer off, my expectation is
> that none of the invisible objects can be selected.
>
> On 11/19/2015 11:20 AM, Jon Evans wrote:
> > This is also how it works in PADS and it is one of those features that I
> > really miss when using tools without it:
> >
> > http://i.imgur.com/Ifd30l4.jpg
> >
> > In fact, switching what you can select is such a common task that they
> > have it on the right-click menu when you click in empty space:
> > http://i.imgur.com/WMVvIm8.jpg
> >
> > Notice there are quick shortcuts to enable/disable several filters at
> > once, e.g. "Select Traces/Pins/Unroutes"
> >
> > PADS also has a "selection disambiguation" feature where if you click to
> > select, you can then hit tab to cycle through selectable things within
> > some radius of where you clicked.  This makes it very easy to select
> > things that are on top of each other, or to switch between selecting a
> > trace going into a component pad, the component pad itself, and the
> > whole component.  I like this method better than the "selection
> > clarification" popup in KiCAD, because it lets me *visually* choose the
> > right clarification, rather than in KiCAD where I have to guess between
> > the names of things that are sometimes hard to tell apart.
> >
> > On Thu, Nov 19, 2015 at 10:54 AM, Andy Peters <devel@xxxxxxxxx
> > <mailto:devel@xxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
> >
> >
> >     > On Nov 19, 2015, at 1:25 AM, Константин Барановский <
> baranovskiykonstantin@xxxxxxxxx
> >     <mailto:baranovskiykonstantin@xxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
> >     >
> >     > I think will be perfect to add filtering panel with buttons, like
> it done in ARES from Proteus VSM. I mean, panel that contains bi-state
> buttons (or checkboxes) for pcb's items like footprints, tracks, vias,
> pads, zones, etc. And on selecting something on pcb not selected items (on
> that panel) will be ignored.
> >
> >     This ability to control what can be selected was also in the old
> >     Ultiboard 2001 I used to use, and it’s quite handy.
> >
> >     -a
> >
> >
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