kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Chris Pavlina <pavlina.chris@xxxxxxxxx>]

Very nice. I only think it needs to be a bit more obvious how to do it.

On Sat, Feb 11, 2017 at 05:49:05PM -0500, Jon Evans wrote:
> 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
> >
> >