kicad-developers team mailing list archive

["Steven A. Falco" <stevenfalco@xxxxxxxxx>]

I tried asking this question on a KiCad user forum but didn't get anything usable, so perhaps I am looking for a new feature or enhancement.  It is also possible that this request overlaps with some of the hot-key work that is on-going.  Please let me know if there is a better place to ask the question and/or propose an enhancement.

I am trying to draw schematic symbols for old-fashioned rotary (wafer) switches; I'm reverse-engineering some Ham equipment from the 1940's, of all things.  But, this "want" has come up before for other symbols, so I think it's worth asking about.

I'm using a C program to generate most of the graphic elements in these symbols, because everything is in polar coordinates.  Here is a link to one of the symbols:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/doeyriwtktgo41p/Screenshot_20190515_172040.jpg?dl=0

There are two things that would make this easier:

1) A way to assign a hot-key to a Symbol Editor grid setting; i.e. something similar to the pcbnew "Fast Switching" feature in the Grid menu.  Basically, I need to switch between at least two different grid resolutions, because I draw part of the schematic symbol algorithmically and part of it manually in the Symbol Editor.  Ideally, it would be nice to be able to uniformly assign a hot-key for the grid size in all of the tools.

2) A way to have the Symbol Editor re-read the library file from the disk.  Right now, I have to close and open the Symbol Editor to get it to read the symbol from a .lib file.  I have to iterate many times as I tune up my C program to generate the proper symbol elements, and it gets tedious to keep doing "close/open/select".

Hopefully this request is of some general interest, but please let me know if it is "insane". :-)

	Steve