After upgrading to kicad 8 from 7 I now have a new window for footprint selection. The new one is very limited and I would like to know if I ca go back to the old one with a setting.
See the new vs old below.
The critical thing missing in the new is the possibility to do measurements.
The new “Footprint chooser” window is the new standard dialog for selecting footprints. The old window is currently available from the pcb editor–>View–>Footprint library browser. There is no flag/setting to change the displayed footprint selection dialog.
The missing ability to quickly measure something in the “footprint chooser” dialog is tracked in gitlab issue #17107: Measurement tool missing from footprint chooser (#17107) · Issues · KiCad / KiCad Source Code / kicad · GitLab
Note that the new “footprint chooser” dialog on the other hand offers some new improvements/additions, which may help in the everyday work.
You may read a longer discussion here:
Thank you for the input.
I did find this thread on my own soon after my post.
In my personal workflow the new window is a major step backwards. I do see and understand your arguments for the new window. However I don’t feel they are convincing.
That you can’t search all libs at the same time should be a fixable problem in the old window. And if it’s unfixable, I can live with it as the category’s are pretty good.
“Also the footprint chooser looks like the symbol chooser in eeschema.”
My rebuttal here is “why does it need to be so?” . One is for a purely logical object and the other for something physical in the real world. That they should and would be the same look/interface is not given.
In a problem scale 1-10 this is maybe an 8. It sounds harsh for somthing this small but the time expended in the new interface is added up for every part. It’s like removing “d” shortcut for datasheet in schematic. It sound very minor but it saves maybe an 30-60min a day not needing to manually search for datasheets online.
Anyway. Thanks for you feedback and engagement!
