5.99: Silkscreen text selection behaviour click vs. lassoo

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Continuing my barrage of 5.99-related questions… If I want to select silkscreen text, I have to either lasso the parent footprint, or click directly on the silkscreen text. What I can’t do is select only ‘Text’ in the selection filter and then lasso some silkscreen text. With that selection filter, it still works if I explicitly click on each item of text I want to select.

Is this behaviour by design? If not, I’ll file an issue.

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There is no “lasso” function that I know of in KiCad. Do you mean the rectangular box select?

For me it works as expected. If I turn off all selection filters (in Lower right corner of the screen), except “[x] Text” then selections only work on text.

Same with the [Right Mouse Button] popup menu.

A bit later…
Ah, I think that I know now what you mean.
“Text” in Pcbnew is only regarded as texts manually added, and not texts on silkscreen that are part of Footprints. This is likely by design. What would be the use of moving all silkscreen text of footprints away from the footprints? Do you have a use case for this?

Maybe it’s possible to write a Python script for this. Something like:

  1. Select the footprints.
  2. Run script to exclude everything except “RefDes” texts.
  3. Work with your selection.

I do not do scripting myself in KiCad though, so can’t help you there.

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@paulvdh It it indeed the rectangular select I was referring to. The use-case I found is that I broke out a couple of wide busses from an MCU, each with a termination resistor. The default placement meant that the silkscreen text was sitting under the component next to each resistor, and therefore I had to move the text in bulk.

It feels to me like a bit of a UI ‘disconnect’ that I can select everything by clicking explicitly on it, but not by using the rectangular select tool.

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So the real issue here is that “box select” works with footprints as a whole and not with individual (text) items of a footprint.

I do not have a solution for this, only workarounds:

  • Use [Shift] and click on all text items to select them individually.
  • Copy the resistor footprint to a project specific library, and assign those to your “bus” resistors. Then you can use the Footprint Editor to move text around and update all those resistors with the new text locations in Pcbnew.
  • Possibly some python scripting to change a selection.
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Yes that’s exactly the issue. Indeed I did Shift+click to work around it, but it was pretty laborious.

I’m just wondering if this behaviour is by design, and what views are on it, before I file an issue.

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