kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Clemens Koller <cko@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello, Chris!

On 2016-05-13 03:06, Chris Pavlina wrote:
> Quick followup, I think I more or less answered my own question and would like
> to suggest my way.
> 
> I think everything should be accessible from the menus. This is pretty
> standard, all the programs I could find that managed to be both complex and
> usable (word processors for instance) had every function available in the
> menus.

I fully agree with you here.

> So, I'd like to take all the toolbar buttons that do _not_ have menu
> items and add them, possibly rearranging the menus a bit to make this work
> better.
>
> I'd also like to reorganize the toolbars a bit to make them a bit easier to
> work with; I'll sketch this out on Balsamiq though rather than talking about
> it.

It might help for the re-arrangement to consider how often a certain
function or settings needs to be accessed/changed to massively reduce the
time/effort to reach the function or setting by re-arranging hotkeys,
shortcuts or context menus.

It is said that Eagle seems quite efficient in that way.
Personally, I like the so called "modeless commands" of Mentor PADS
quite a lot as they definitely help to reduce the number of keystrokes to
access a certain function:
https://eewiki.net/display/MentorGraphics/Designer+Layout+Modeless+Commands

Again: Mouse-clicks in general should have a high penalty when you
frequently do complex timeconsuming designs many hours per day.
Count the mouse-clicks. And if you can reduce a single click or replace
it with a keystroke, do it!

Regards,

Clemens