kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Jon Evans <jon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Proof of concept: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfnXPosOHcY
(when you see the selection changing, I'm hitting the new hotkey I made for
cycling through items)

On Sat, Feb 11, 2017 at 2:24 PM, Chris Pavlina <pavlina.chris@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

> 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
>
>