kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Piotr Esden-Tempski <piotr@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

> On Jul 20, 2017, at 4:44 AM, jp charras <jp.charras@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
[SNIP]
> 
> AFAIK, when moving a single footprint, the anchor point is either one of its
> pads or the footprint origin, the nearest candidate point from mouse cursor.
> 
> Perhaps the algorithm should be slightly modified to use the pad if the mouse cursor is inside a
> pad, and the footprint origin if the mouse cursor is inside the footprint (obviously), but not
> inside a pad.
> 
> It could be a more intuitive behavior.


Very good idea, usually if I click on a component I do not want to move it by the pad unless I explicitly want to do that. Your solution is definitely better than the current behavior.

On the component and general item selection topic.

1) If a component is very large in the current zoom level it should be ignored. It makes it very difficult to select small components that end up on the opposite side of a large component. It is also very unlikely the user will want to move the thing that is not even visible at the moment because it is 10x the size of the viewport. :)
2) Add the option to use a button to flip through potential selections. Having to use the mouse to select the component I meant from a list of candidates is really annoying. Other software packages have a nicer behavior for this: select a component and allow swapping through candidates using the right mouse button (this could be a keyboard shortcut too) and then confirm with another left click. (a good example is how the package with a bird does that, this is one of the few things I miss from using that software on daily basis. :) )

I hope this is useful in some way.

Just a few of my own 2c regarding the component selection behavior. :D

Cheers,
Piotr