kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Dan Weatherill <dan.weatherill@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Jost,

spacenavigator support has long been one of my top wishlist items in 
Kicad, and one of the main things that I miss from mostly using Altium - 
I thought about trying to implement it myself a couple of years ago, but 
at that time it seemed difficult to imagine anything like a "smooth" 
scrolling experience with the legacy canvas. That still seems like it 
might be the case in the schematic editor, though with the new canvas in 
the PCB editor seems like it could be achieved.

As far as libspnav goes, look through the source, it's actually pretty 
simple. I'm not sure how blender is doing it, or whether this is a good 
idea, but the device handling is actually pretty thinly veiled around 
evdev.

Dan W



On 15/05/17 18:10, mrkenhoff wrote:
> 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
>
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