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MitjaNemec / Kicad_action_plugins

Kicad action plugins
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Place selected footprints only #97

Closed icnagy closed 3 years ago

icnagy commented 4 years ago

Hi,

Thank you for these plugins, they really improve KiCad’s workflow!

I use the place footprints one quite often, find it invaluable to lay out front panel controls. However I found it to be a bit cumbersome when I only want to place a selection of footprints. (Disclaimer: I am new with KiCad so I might not be doing things the KiCad way) I either end up selecting more than one footprint before running the plugin and realising I only have to select one, or have to deselect already placed ones and/or hand-pick the ones I’d like to arrange. So with this change:

Hope you find it useful.

MitjaNemec commented 4 years ago

Thanks for your contribution. I'll have to review the code and UX, so more comments are likely to follow.

I like the idea but my first approach would be to implement this as a separate subset. So the user would have to chose in the first dialog from: By selection, By reference, By sheet. So at the moment I am not sure which approach is best.

icnagy commented 4 years ago

Thank you! Appreciate your time and feedback!

Tried to add a third button to the dialog, but I’m afraid it’s out of my reach. I got it to display, but no events fired.

MitjaNemec commented 4 years ago

Tried to add a third button to the dialog, but I’m afraid it’s out of my reach. I got it to display, but no events fired.

I don't mind handling technical stuff. What is your opinion on UX in this case?

icnagy commented 4 years ago

👍 I don’t mind technical challenges, but noticed there are resources for some kind of form builder tool that I don’t have installed and I just poked around in the generated python files. Back-porting those changes to the form builder tool could become quite difficult.

About the UX: I don’t mind the third button, definitely much cleaner than having two slightly different behaviours under the same button.

By selection, By reference, By sheet

Sounds good to me.

MitjaNemec commented 4 years ago

Yeah, you should not change computer generated code. I use wxFormBuilder version 3.9.0 from https://github.com/wxFormBuilder/wxFormBuilder/releases

MitjaNemec commented 3 years ago

Ok, it took me some time, but I've managed to implement this with dedicated UI so that you can select which footprint serves as a pivot. The code is at the moment in MitjaNemec:place_by_selection branch.

You might want to test it and report back. If everything is fine, I'll merge it to master and close this PR.

icnagy commented 3 years ago

I think it works really great! Hope others will find it helpful too! Nice work! Thank you!

MitjaNemec commented 3 years ago

Thanks.