kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[John Beard <john.j.beard@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Feb 13, 2017 at 6:39 AM, Jon Evans <jon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> The core of the issue is how KiCad thinks about selection of objects
> compared to most other software that deals with graphical objects that the
> user interacts with.
>
> Most applications have the concept of a "selection set" that contains 0 or
> more objects.  You can select one or more objects, and then separately from
> the action of selecting, you can do things to the objects.  KiCad uses a
> more "immediate" concept of selection -- you select an object at the same
> time as doing something to it.

Hi Jon,

Are you talking about the GAL canvases, or legacy? The GAL canvases do
have a concept of the "current selection", which is what is used by
actions, and the drag selection works a lot like a "normal" graphical
program like Inkscape, for example.

You can also use Shift-click to add items to a selection, before
invoking an action.

Invoking an action without a selection often has an additional special
behaviour - select whatever is currently under the cursor and act on
that. Generally, you see this in hotkeys, e.g. 'M', and this saves a
lot of clicking if you only want to deal with one item.

Cheers,

John