kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Jon Evans <jon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

I had been thinking about proposing this already as a UX enhancement, and
then while looking through the starter bugs realized that lp:1154020 [1] is
actually quite difficult to solve in a nice way due to the popup menu used
for clarification today, so I decided to send it out now.

I propose that we change the selection code to "guess" at the item the user
wanted to select, and let the user cycle through the set of items that are
near the last point they clicked with a hotkey (and possible a context menu
option "Next").  This is similar to how the commercial tools I've used work.

A few more ideas about this:

- The currently selected item needs to be indicated somehow.  Currently we
don't highlight all items when selected (for example, fields) and so either
highlighting which item you are selecting or showing it in the message
panel would be required for this to be friendly.

- This would tie in nicely to selection filtering stuff that other devs are
working on.  Turning on a selection filter mode ("components only", "text
objects only", etc) would restrict the set of items that can be picked, and
greatly increase the chance that the right item will be selected on the
first click.

- Some commercial tools have "focus" modes, which are kind of like filters,
but they don't restrict what you can select, but rather influence what will
be selected first.  So if you are in "component focus mode" and you select
a component with a label on top, the component will always be selected
first.

- We could map two hotkeys next to each other (for example "," and "." on
QWERTY keyboards) and let people step forward and backward through the
clarification list

I think this change would make item selection faster, allow fixing some
long-standing bugs, and work nicely with enhancements to selection
filtering that are coming.  The one downside is that you would no longer
get a list of all items that are underneath the cursor, but I can't see the
value in that information.

Any thoughts on this?

Best,
Jon

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/kicad/+bug/1154020