kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Jeff Young <jeff@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Rene,

Comments in-line:

> On 19 Feb 2018, at 12:07, Rene Pöschl <poeschlr@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> On 19/02/18 12:14, Jeff Young wrote:
>> The Open / List All button is much faster on all libraries than it used to be, and it’s a bit of a step-child to Search by Keyword and Select by Browser anyway.
>> 
>> So, I’m going to propose that we add a Library selection widget to New Footprint..., Export Library... and Save As... and otherwise abandon the active library concept.
> 
> If you remove the active library concept from the "list all" stuff then you might want to add a way to filter (by library) after that dialog opened.
> The live filtering of the list all dialog is much more powerful then the filter by keyword button. (I personally never use the search by keyword feature as i in most cases know in what lib a footprint resides. Otherwise i can use search all without having an active lib.)

I have no issue against this in principal, but why not just use the Select by Browser then?  It’s not only got the by-library organisation, but it has better filtering across libraries, and it shows nice images.

Hmmm… I suppose the Browser is missing the Filter option….

> 
> One use-case where filtering by a specific lib might be helpful is library maintenance. The maintainer might have multiple different versions of the same lib in their system. (I have three copies of the footprint library added to my review project. Differentiated by a prefix to the library nickname. Results in >300 libs active in this project.)
> 
> The save button should also have a way to remember in which lib the currently edited footprint resides and offer a one click save. (Fill out the target lib and footprint name such that by default the current footprint is overwritten.)
> The use-case for "i want to edit a footprint" is much more common then "i want to copy a footprint to a different lib/name". (At least for me.)

Indeed, that’s the root motivation behind getting rid of the active library concept.

> 
> A bonus would be if the selection of the target lib is made easy via some live filtering option. (The official lib already has >100 footprint libs)
> 
> And please do not remove the lib browser! This is the only way of checking a large number of footprints in a fast way. This feature has already been removed for symbols. (By removing the symbol selector with the preview.) Don't make the same mistake on the footprint side.

Could you say more about this?  Do you mean the Footprints view in the Symbol Selector?  (You can re-enable that through preferences.)  Or something else?

Cheers,
Jeff.