Is there a quick way to get a list of components in PCBnew and locate them on click? Similar to what the footprint assignment tools does for the schematic. That would be very useful when assembling the pcb.
Yes there is:
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The plugin linked by @qu1ck is very good if you want help with assembly. If you only want a list of placed parts then the normal BOM export might already be enough. See: How to create a bill of materials (BOM)?
I am not sure what you want.
“Getting a list of components” and “Locate on click” are 2 different things.
Just did a simple test with my KiCad V5.1.0 and if Eeschema and Pcbnew are both opened at the same time (Multi monitor setup) then Pcbnew pans and highlights a component if you select it in Eeschema. This also works the other way around.
If you open a search box in Pcbnew with [Ctrl + F] and enter a refdes name they get highlighted in both Pcbnew and Eeschema.
[Ctrl + F] in Eeschema has another search box with a drop down list, but there seem to be many more items in that drop-down list then there are schematic symbols on the board, a lot of the unknown components can also not be found. The search box in Eeschema does jump to the component searched for, but it’s not synchronised with Pcbnew (Looks like a bug, but it may already be known).
Alternatively, you can make a .pdf of your pcb, and use a pdf viewer to search and locate stuff. If you can then also manage to add a BOM to your PDF you have both a list and the locations on the PCB to experiment with.
Editors for pdf’s are slowly becoming more common. On Linux there are simple tools to combine multiple .pdf files into one. With Libre office, gimp, Inkscape, etc there are pdf import tools integrated (gimp probably makes bitmaps out of the text, which makes it useless for searching).
Does this actually work? I thought all the text in KiCad (both EESchema and PCBNew) are stroke fonts that get converted to line segments on print or plot. I could be wrong though…
Searchable text in PDF files generated by KiCad has been on my wishlisth for quite a long time.
And indeed It works now. Probably since KiCad V5.
I know it has worked for some time in .pdf’s generated from schematics, but was not sure about PCB’s. So I made a pdf of the silkscreen of a PCB of mine to test it:
And as you can see in the screnshot above, all the “R” 's got highlighted when searching for them. so they are recognised as text.
KiCad is improving almost faster than normal users kan keep up with 
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Thats exactly what I’m looking for! Building that into kicad would be super useful.
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