kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Jon Evans <jon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi John,

I am mainly looking at eeschema right now, so I haven't studied the GAL
code closely yet.  pcbnew's behavior in GAL canvas is certainly better than
legacy and eeschema, but still does some odd things that I want to look
at.  I will have to get familiar with GAL in order to see how my change to
eeschema's behavior would apply once it's ported to using GAL.

The change I've made in my branch doesn't change the behavior you mention
-- if you have nothing selected, hitting a hotkey still searches under the
cursor for something and selects it for the action.  Right now, in my "new
selection mode", it will not prompt you to clarify your selection if you
hit a hotkey while hovering over multiple items -- it will do the action on
the top item.  I need to play with it more to see if this is the best
behavior or whether it makes sense to bring back the popup menu for this
case.  It might make sense to have a popup menu here, because (1) it
doesn't matter that the popup menu breaks double-clicking because you're
using a keyboard hotkey, and (2) ideally you would only hit this scenario
rarely once we have good selection filtering commands, because generally
you will already be in the proper filter mode to (for example) only select
components for moving, etc.

Best,
Jon

On Sun, Feb 12, 2017 at 7:12 PM, John Beard <john.j.beard@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> 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
>