kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Jon Evans <jon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Feb 25, 2020 at 6:04 PM Eeli Kaikkonen <eeli.kaikkonen@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

> The problem with all tree structure UI's is that they are difficult to
> navigate. The locations of the top level items change based on what is
> opened. There's constant need or at least temptation to open and close
> items. Tabs are always there and you learn them by heart quickly. You can
> instantly change between clearance violations and nonconnected items. I
> would probably hate to have everything in one tree. I have intended to file
> a report asking to add tabs, at least for edge.cuts and courtyards. But I
> think it would be best to have both - a couple of tabs for completely
> different things, and tree structures inside some of them.
>

The problem with tabs is that they can only expand so far before you have
to start scrolling (and so some tabs are not visible).

My proposal doesn't necessarily have to be a tree -- in fact, it might be
better implemented as a flat grid (i.e. the first column is the category of
violation) sorted by category.

We are going to want to have enough categories so that you can turn on and
off rules by category (or ignore rules by category) and not cast too wide a
net.
I think this is going to mean somewhere between 15 and 20 categories at the
end of the day, once KiCad supports all the kinds of DRC that commercial
tools do.
I would not want to navigate a structure of 15-20 tabs, and I would also
not want to have the 15-20 categories broken down into 3-5 tabs (because
I'd be constantly forgetting which tab contained which kind of violation)

@Jeff -- fair point, but on the other hand, I have not seen a commercial
tool that warns you that a rule is turned off.  So, I'm not convinced that
KiCad actually needs to warn people that a rule is turned off.
If we want to keep this behaviour, I would want to think about how best to
generalize it to other kinds of checks, as surely this won't be the last
"slow" check that people disable for speed reasons.

We could have a "meta-DRC" setting that when enabled, generates a warning
for each category that is disabled, saying "this category of checks was not
run"?

Setting a reporting level (off/warning/error is the current proposal) is
definitely a thing that we want to add.  So given that, a quick switch
between showing the levels in the report/UI sounds good to me.

-Jon