Cannot select complex symbol

Hello,

i have a symbol for a 9 pin connector. I made some annotations near the pins in the schematics
No i need to change the footprint of the symbol, but cannot select the symbol correctly to reach properties settings. Every time there is additional text or something else selected, so there is no properties entry any longer

test3

wolfgam

Long press with mouse button opens the clarification menu for selection.

This does not work in this case. Long press does not work with different objects.
e.g. selecting 2 pins (or 1 pin and text) + long press gives no result…

I found the solution: Selecting a graphical Sub-Symbol from a symbol without special meanings (e.g. not symbol name, pin, pin number). Then the whole symbol is selected. In this case the filled rectangle near the pin number.

Long press is not meant to work when you already have something selected, but to give an opportunity to select one (or all) of several possibilities when they overlap and automatic choosing algorithm doesn’t do what you want. In this case it doesn’t seem to work too well, but at least I can select this kind of symbol by pointing to a “root” of a pin line and doing long press.

EDIT: I tried with this:

image

It’s even more difficult because it doesn’t have any graphics, and somehow appearing of the symbol in the clarification menu seems to be a bit semi-random. Usually symbols have larger areas of graphics and selecting it is easier.

I find this expressed in a very cautious way.
After not having used KiCad for a considerable time, I am using it a lot more in the last few weeks, and I’m mildly annoyed by a lot of small usability issues such as this. I’m quite unpleasantly surprised that I find so many issues so easily, even though the issues themselves are small. As an example if you hover near a pin and the auto wire function gets activated, you can’t grab that part anymore, not even by pressing the m hotkey (or e for edit in this case is probably also blocked). As I go along I’m creating a list of issues to report on gitlab, and I’ve already reported a few in the last week.

In that case I don’t think I would expect it to work at all . . . all there is to select is the symbol, so it should just select it, as long as you get within it’s “range”.

Yes there is something else, the pins and texts. To make selecting pins a bit easier they have a bit larger area around them where you can select them.

In any case I recommend trying this:

This doesn’t seem to be the default, but IMO it should be a rare use case to select individual pins in a schematic. Well, it lets cross-probe to an individual pad in the PCB.

1 Like

A method that seems to work reasonably well (but is in itself also a workaround) is to not try to click on a symbol but drag a small box from right to left over a part of the symbol. ( Dragging a box from left to right necessitates dragging it over the complete symbol before it becomes part of the selection).

I’m extremely happy to read this.

You can also help, even if you don’t have or want to create a gitlab account. Just having concise bug descriptions that make bugs clear and easy to replicate already helps a lot. If I’ve verified such a thing I can copy & paste it in a gitlab issue.

But it’s also complicated.
I don’t run the nightlies at the moment, and grid related things are for example quite a lot different in the nightlies, see: Post-v7 new features and development news - #26 by mikebwilliams and therefore I’m apprehensive with reporting grid related things, and that is just one example.

This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.