I am kind of sad to see the big empty white area go away.
In it’s current stat it was not useful, but it had a promise of some future functionality.
Some things that could have gone into that box:
- File preview (schematic / PCB)
- Project notes (text file)
- General error messages / status
A logical solution would also be to make it look sort of like a file browser window in “icon” mode. In that way it has the icons for Eeschema, Pcbnew, etc, but also the icons from the files in the project directory.
A possible solution for the long path names:
They can be shown in the pane on the left in a “tree” view kind of way, so each sub directory is one line of text. To keep it compact, not all directories on sub levels are displayed, but just the path to the current project.
Here a screen mock-up, made in a drawing program:
I’ve drawn a red box around the “current active project”. That can be improved I think.
This could also be expanded to browsing to another directory, and making another project active. In that case, show the directory listing of the “deepest” current level, and another project could then be made active by double clicking on a KiCad project directory, or KiCad project file.
Also: Some time ago I did an experiment with hierarchical “multi PCB” projects and it seemed to work. In short, Each PCB has it’s own project (all in the same directory), but there is also a “mother’ project”. which does not have a PCB itself, but has hierarchical sheets to the other project files. This is officially “not supported” (as far as I know) but similar functionality has been requested multiple times on this user forum. It would be nice if changes to the project manager are made with (growing in the direction of something like this.