← Back to team overview

kicad-developers team mailing list archive

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