Not sure if I misunderstand how this is supposed to work but I have used it successfully a lot before so I think I’m in some kind of corner case. Just want to go here before the bugtracker so I’m not just missing something simple:
I want to align these two towards my visual left, the upper one:
Both the context menus align to left and align to right aligns it towards my right, they do the same thing:
I think it happens because when I select the second item, C5 I have to refine my selection between that one and the pot on the front layer. The front layer blinks when I select so I think there’s some bug in “last touched” layer stateful logic going on here…?
Yes, I can confirm - if I instead select C5 first, then R9 without having to refine my selection, align to left now works as expected.
5.1.0-872-g15241b7fc (the latest). I can affirm that there’s something strange with align (although it generally works), under some conditions it aligns to wrong direction. But I can’t pinpoint the conditions exactly. As you said, it may involve bottom layer, selection clarification or maybe the selection order.
Just updated to latest nightly 5.1.0-868-gc939e3607 and to me nothing happens on any alignment/distribution action. The mouse moves after clicking it but no components ever move.
I rely heavily on this feature and I’m somewhat blocked. Does anyone know if there’s been work on this in the nightlies that might merit a downgrading? I guess I’ll try a stable build just to get moving…
There has been some work within a couple of days which has touched pcbnew ACTIONs, maybe it was a short lived bug? Try newer nightly when it comes available. But as I said, there’s still something wrong.
Or remove the offending thing with a text editor… Can you show the line? EDIT: even if you’re not going to edit it - it may be beneficial to others to know about the incompatibility.
Personally I’ve never even tried to use the align feature.
When I want things aligned I usually grab the components individually and place them on a coarse grid.
When doing this you have to be aware that components can be grabbed in several locations. You can grab a pad, or you can grab the attachment point (often Pin 1 for THT, and center of the body for SMT) and you need to drag all components to be aligned from the same feature.
Doing it this way can of course also be used as a workaround if there is a bug in the “align” function.
I would caution against working with 5.1 and the nightlies on the same project. We will not only be adding new tags but we will be removing old tags that are no longer used. In this case, I have removed the segments per zone tag. This means that when opening a board in 5.1 after hand editing to remove the “max_error” tag will revert to the default segments per zone rather than what was in the file previously. This will probably not cause major issues unless you explicitly set the number before but in the future, removed tags might.
