So I have a busy board and I have grouped many decoupling caps to a large IC. I would like to move one cap in the group but to do so it seems as if you have to ungroup everything, move the component then regroup. This group has 13 components and its a lot of clicking to just move a single component. I tried double clicking on the component (similar to how you can in Inkscape to select a specific item in a group but no dice).
Thanks in advance,
Jacob
Select the group, right click and
I was blind, I see it now! Thank you! Now I wonder can you easily add a new component to a group?
Jacob
Maybe there is a direct method, but I could not find it.
Grouping is relatively new in KiCad. Functionality is often still quite limited for new features, but it will be expanded over time.
You can nest groups into each other:
Nesting groups is a bit ugly if you just want a single group.
You can simpify the group with another hack / workaround:
By moving it a big and defined distance you can make the new group easily, and it’s also easy to move it the same distance in the reverse direction to put it back again.
Select the group, add to the selection the item you want to add (shift+click) and group again.
That works (I assume we were typing at the same time).
But then you have two nested groups.
I have not seen a method to add something to an existing group.
Here I added a 3rd LED to a group of two LED’s.
Yeah, but who cares? Unless you want to manipulate an item, then its one additional click per level (Enter Group)
I do care.
In this simple example it does not matter much, but if you want to change those groups during maintenance of your project a few times it will become a convoluted mess.
I also dare say that having functions to add or remove items from a group is such a logical thing to expect that it should just be implemented.
There is a function to remove something from a group, but this becomes difficult quickly when groups are nested.
Do you think it’s worth a feature request?
it’s a few steps but it’s more straightforward than it seems, since ungrouping leaves the selection intact
Yes, I think such a feature is definitely worth requesting!
Gitlab issue created:
This is the way I have been doing it.
Select the group, open Properties, press the Plus button, select an item to be added.
EDIT: only one item at a time, and this seems to be somewhat buggy. I’m not sure what’s the problem, but when I need to use “expand selection” because of overlapping items, it doesn’t add the selected footprint.
I closed the issue again because it is indeed possible to do so.
I’m in doubt whether that was a good idea as the interface to add items to a group feels quite clunky and not intuitive at all.
There should probably be an issue telling that it needs rework, otherwise I guess it will not be remembered or discovered.
FWIW, double-clicking a group does an Enter Group.
Interesting, and a bit unintuitive. For other items double click opens Properties. And entering the group doesn’t give any indicator or hint that it has happened.
Indeed.
Have you noticed the bounding box has a slightly different shade of pale when you enter the group?
There is an issue on gitlab to use the “high contrast” mode while a group is entered:
Yeah, this is amazing, I wonder why I didn’t notice that this happens the first time I tried it. I would say that this even works better than Inkscape since you still see the group boundary and in Inkscape there is no clear indication that you are in a group.
What would be really nice is if there was a hierarchical view of the groups in a design.