kicad-developers team mailing list archive
-
kicad-developers team
-
Mailing list archive
-
Message #29464
3D Mouse (Spacenavigator) support
Hello everyone,
I would like to add support for the SpaceNavigator 3D mouse if nobody
objects.
Being able to pan around the schematic or pcb canvas while keeping your
other hand busy doing the "real work" might improve the ergonomics and
efficiency of KiCad. To avoid having to constantly move your hand to the
keyboard for shortcuts, the two commonly used tools should be
user-assigneable to the buttons on the mouse. I dont know how much of an
improvement a 3D mouse will yield in a 2D application like KiCad, but
since I expect the implementation to be quite straight forward I would
like to give it a try.
Speaking of implementation, this is what I thought of:
The "spacenav" library provides a simple API to communicate with the 3D
mouse. It's the open source (GPL3) alternative for the proprietary
library provided by 3Dconnexion (The manufacturer of the SpaceNavigator).
The only problem I see is operating system portability: The spacenav
library is only available for Linux right now. Windows and OSX would
still depend on the proprietary library (Same API by the way). There
must be a possibility to get around that, since the open source software
Blender supports the SpaceNavigator mouse on all operating systems. I
will take a look at their implementation later.
I would like to hear any comments regarding my idea and whether or not
you think 3D mouse support would be a usefull improvement for KiCad.
So far for now..
Jost
Follow ups