kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Rene Pöschl <poeschlr@xxxxxxxxx>]

Some more answers to what andy wrote.
Disclaimer not a dev only the main lib maintainer and very active on the 
user forum.

In general: Make bug reports for feature requests. Your requests will be 
forgotten by being only here on the mailing list. But check first if 
what you request has already been requested. If it has mark the bug as 
affects me as well plus maybe add clarifications in the bug comments if 
you feel your particular usecase is not presented well enough.

Oh and don't take me too seriously i already worked 10 hours today and 
english is not my first language.

---

On 12/03/19 18:21, Ruth Ivimey-Cook wrote:
> Common: I am still frustrated that the key combinations for similar 
> tasks are not the same. For example, to place a wire in schema, it's 
> shift-W while in pcb it's shift-X.


Well in eeschema you place wires. But in pcb_new you place traces using 
the interactive router. (And you can change the assignment. And you do 
not even need the shift key, only w or x work fine.)


> I am still frustrated that some task combinations aren't possible: 
duplicate doesn't work on wires

You can dublicate wires by using group selection. (But there is no 
hotkey for that. So i suggest crtl+c -> crtl+v)

This was always the case. To be honest i see no usecase for duplicating 
single wire segments as i feel it is faster to press w and lay down a 
new wire than to duplicate one.


> duplicate does not work on connectors


What do you mean with connectors in this case? Do you possibly mean the 
junction dot or bus connectors? See my answer regarding wires.

Or do you mean symbols for connectors? In this case i can tell you that 
i do not have a problem duplicating them like any other symbol. (shortcut c)


> I am still frustrated that some task combinations aren't possible: 
drag doesn't work on graphic lines or components, etc.


Footprint drag is not trivial as you would need a kind of powerful semi 
autorouter to get anything sensible out if it. (I am not sure how much 
work it would be to get the interactive router to the point where this 
is possible.) To be honest this is one of the few things that i kind of 
like in eagle.

For symbols drag already works but i would guess you want it to result 
in nicer looking schematics (or was the common title of this section not 
quite correct?)


> I would love to see a setup kicad libraries action (probably not 
limited to an installer) which configures the library settings and 
installs libraries to match.

How should kicad know which libraries to "install"?

In general library assets are included in the project (In the pcb file 
and in the cache library, the later will hopefully also be embedded in 
the future.)

Meaning it is not as bad as you think if the person opening the project 
does not have the same library setup. (Worst thing right now is that the 
rescue dialog opens. Yes this will result in changes to the schematic 
but this will hopefully be a thing of the past with version 6)

> The reason is that my understanding is that because the library files 
are being updated (great) that can make a given project dependent on a 
given issue of library

KiCad v5 no longer automatically updates any library assets. Such an 
action must be triggered by the user. (Yes it was a stupid idea for 
version 4 to use on demand online libraries. We learned from that mistake.)

Also we have a rule that no design breaking changes are allowed (within 
reson) during a minor release series. This means you should not run into 
too much trouble updating the library from v5.0.2 to 5.1.0 for example. 
(Some changes are still necessary as we will discover bugs. And some 
simply get through on accident. We have after all ~100 contributions per 
week to deal with.)

> witness recent change of location of pin headers

Ähm? Do you mean going from v4 to v5? If so then yes the library 
reorganization was part of the release notes. There where no such 
changes during the minor releases!

My suggestion is to have v4 libs locally in a separate location to deal 
with v4 projects. This is possible right now using project local library 
setups. Only trouble are 3d models but if you want them to work then you 
simply need to change the KISYS3DMOD path variable to point to version 4 
models. (And yes i would wish for a better solution here. I think v5.1 
introduced 3d model search paths which should allow for this usecase. 
However the original footprints are setup to directly use the path 
variable as this was necessary in the past. So the search path thing 
will only help for future updates not for past ones.)

> In this case, relying on a "system" library (as is true for 
/Libraries/Application Support/kicad on mac) makes no sense.

You know you can personally clone the library repos to any place on your 
system right? You really do not need to rely on the system provided 
ones. (Simply point the path variables to your local setup.)

More details for such a setup see: 
https://forum.kicad.info/t/library-management-in-kicad-version-5/14636


> Pcb: I would love to be able to switch on/off snap-to-pad or 
snap-to-wire, as sometimes I want to make small adjustments to a track 
and to do that I first have to move it a lot and then back again. Having 
snap to grid / snap-to-pad / snap-to-wire as separate option buttons 
would be great.

can be done in the preferences and with either alt, shift or crtl keys 
(Can't quite remember which one does what as it is pure muscle memmory 
for me.)