I did a handful of projects recently with KiCad and now have one more in Altium. Both are really fun to use. One thing however that constantly is going on my nerves with KiCad (even after a decent amount of practise under my belt) is the missing pan function. The right mouse button pan in Altium is so fluid and natural to use that after a few minutes you ask yourself how you ever could work without it.
Back to KiCad is just ugly. I have “warp to center on zoom” enabled and I am aware of the idea behind it. I also know that the middle mouse button is set to pan.
However, I work on different computers depending on project and none has a decent middle button mouse. I mostly work with “super scroll wheel” logitech mice (like M720), which can scroll 10000 excel lines with one finger flip due to its heavy freewheeling mouse wheel. These are just invaluable for today’s monster documents. However, middle (=scroll wheel) push is crap. I needs so much force to press that it is a pain to use. Also it has scroll wheel tilt left/right buttons, which you accidently hit all the time (with involuntary scrolling on top). On one machine MMB is set to the task switcher.
Petition: PLEASE introduce a decent pan mechanism. What about Ctrl+right mouse button? Or Space+mouse move like Adobe?
I don’t have a problem with the middle pan button. I use an old Logitech M210 mouse at work and an MX Master at home which also has the freewheeling wheel and have no problems with either. A few of the other programs I use regularly also use this method including Fusion360 and Foxit pdf creator/viewer.
Is there something in the mouse settings you could change to make them work better for this usage.
Maybe this is something I have just got used to after doing it for so long.
Maybe disable mouse wheel left/right action. Or take apart all mice and remove the super strong middle mouse button spring (if there is any).
I just thought a configurable pan (eg. ctrl-RMB) would be nice!
In the unstable development version 5.99 you can assign actions to keys and mouse much more freely, and actually panning is already assigned to both center and right buttons IIRC.
Just tried Application: PcbnewVersion: (5.99.0-8651-g3e42ba18a9), release build
Right mouse button pan works perfectly, I disabled center on zoom. I also had to disable the automatic zoom speed (too jerky) and set the slider to roughly 1/3.
Perfect!
Depending on the model, If you have the logitech software installed, you can set application specific profiles for buttons. You can set no action to the side-scroll specifically for KiCad for example. I did that for Fusion 360 as I kept hitting it accidentally.