kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Marco Ciampa <ciampix@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear devs,
in my humble opinion KiCad needs to be a more consistent about the help
manual reader key (F1) as it is already for the Ctrl+F1 combination
(hotkey list).

I think that it should be F1 for all the KiCad suite apps.
I do not know if the issue was already mentioned earlier, but I think
that this should definitely put into the KiCad 6 roadmap.

In Eeschema and in the Pl_editor the help menu reports erraneously that
F1 opens the manual but actually the default is that F1 is Zoom in and F2
Zoom out.

In the other apps of the KiCad suite, apart from the KiCad project
manager itself, F1 does not work for that function but, again, for
Zooming in and there is not a default key nor an action that can be
remapped for opening of the manual.

Actually (KiCad 5.1) the key F1 is Zoom-in in Eeschema, Pcbnew, GerbView,
Symbol and footprint editors or is nothing (no action) in Pcb calculator
and Bitmap converter.

See https://github.com/KiCad/kicad-doc/issues/758

An alternative is to use an unmapped key like ? or Ctrl+?  or Ctrl-F2 or
put Ctrl+F1 for help and Ctrl+F2 for hotkey list or any other combination 
but it should be consistently the same in all apps...

PS: in a not so distant future it could be a "contextual help", so please
consider to leave the space to another "help related key" like:

F1 = help
Ctrl + F1 = contextual help (planned)
Ctrl + F2 = hotkey list

or

Ctrl + F1 = help
Ctrl + F2 = hotkey list
Ctrl + F3 = contextual help (planned)

Please comment...

--

Saluton,
Marco Ciampa