kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Chris Pavlina <pavlina.chris@xxxxxxxxx>]

I wish I had thoughts more verbose than "yes" right now... Yeah, this is
how most tools work, and it's quite intuitive. I would be 100% in favor
of implementing it this way.

On Sat, Feb 11, 2017 at 02:21:08PM -0500, Jon Evans wrote:
> 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