Hi Orson, Thanks much for your feedback and news about plans for eeschema. I agree that having a common codebase for selection filtering and object inspection across the tools is a great idea (especially since the roadmap has plans for eventually combining the tools more than they are today).
By "intelligent autorouter" in schematic editor, I meant that some of the high-end commercial tools have nicer ways to input wires and buses that act somewhat like an autorouter would for a PCB, meaning there are certain rules that can be set about how wires/buses should look (i.e. must be H/V, must not overlap existing wires, etc), and if you are drawing new wires in "auto" mode, you can simply pick two points to wire between (i.e. two pins, or a pin and existing wire, etc) and the program will draw a wire between them that meets the rules if possible. Of course this requires some tuning and tweaking to be user-friendly, because the constraints are different -- a PCB autorouter can fail and tell the user it isn't possible to route a net. The schematic wire "autorouter" must always place a trace, and the "autorouting" is about making it visually the "best" looking. I have some more concrete examples in my head, and I think I will try to put together some examples to show more about what I mean and how my proposal would work in eeschema. But basically, I think we can get a lot closer to the designer saying "I want to connect X to Y" and having to spend minimal mental energy on picking each corner of the wire, much like the P&S router is designed to reduce mental energy of routing the PCB. Best, Jon On Thu, Dec 1, 2016 at 10:28 AM, Maciej Sumiński <maciej.sumin...@cern.ch> wrote: > Hi Jon, > > We really appreciate your offer. I am quite positive that most of people > here would admit that KiCad begs for some UX improvements. > > GALifying eeschema is going to be a significant refactor, but it will > not happen before v5 release, which is currently planned for Feb 2017. > > IIRC Wayne works on the new file format. I have in my stash some changes > to the symbol library editor (I hope to publish them soon for testing). > The on-going work does not seem to collide with your proposal, unless > there are other plans I am not aware about. > > During a recent KiCad hackathon [1] Oswaldo has volunteered [2] to work > on the Selection Filter for pcbnew. I wonder if it would be possible to > write code generic enough to handle schematic & layout editors or at > least have a common base. Combined with the Object Inspector, which is > also supposed to work with eeschema at one point, it creates a really > powerful toolset. > > Would you elaborate on the "intelligent autorouter" idea? > > Regards, > Orson > > 1. http://www.ohwr.org/projects/cern-kicad/wiki/Hackathon-ehal > 2. https://lists.launchpad.net/kicad-developers/msg26722.html > > On 12/01/2016 02:54 AM, Jon Evans wrote: > > Hi all, > > > > I am an EE and sometimes software developer who has wanted to contribute > to > > KiCad for a while and finally might have some time to do things. I am > kind > > of excited about UI/UX improvement possibilities, and have been > compiling a > > list of things that I might want to work on at some point or at least > just > > poke at to get familiar with the codebase. > > > > I know a big refactor of eeschema is planned/in progress. Can the people > > working on that please advise whether it makes sense for me to work on > any > > of the things in the following list, or if it would be likely to be > wasted > > effort based on what will likely change in the refactor? > > > > - Improvements to wire / bus routing: several bugs here and also some > > wishlist items (H/V restriction working in drag mode, > > auto-connection/junction creation at points on a wire that aren't the > > endpoints, "intelligent autorouter" for schematic wires, fix wires after > > drag, etc) > > - Selection filtering (select anything vs. only components, wires, text, > > etc) > > - Color system improvements -- arbitrary color picker, color themes, etc. > > - Drag selection mode option -- select anything touching vs. select > things > > completely enclosed by drag area > > > > > > Thanks, > > Jon > > >
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