kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Jeff Young <jeff@xxxxxxxxx>]

I implemented a prototype of a WYSIWYG custom-pad shape editor.

You can ctrl-E on a pad and it explodes it and puts you into high-contrast mode with the shapes.  After editing the shapes a second ctrl-E re-combines everything and exits high-contrast mode.

While it’s pretty neat if you do exactly that, it turns out to have a bazillion corner cases.  (What happens if you paste other stuff in; what happens if you delete the pad anchor; what happens if you create new objects on different layers; etc.)

So I was considering a different idea which would be more “regular” (from an implementation perspective).

Basically it would be a command to explode *all* pads in the current footprint, and a command to recombine everything.  The recombine would expand outwards from each pad to consume touching copper shapes.  (It might still need a few edge cases for net-ties.)

Thoughts?