Just a question for my technical culture (I’m running kicad 5.1.4 on Windows 7).
I did not ask this within the initial thread, not to pollute the discussion, I hope I’m in the good section.
I’ve been puzzled quite a lot by this assertion !
I recently added a big monitor to my laptop, and working on both the schematic and the PCB, each one opened on a separate monitor, I noted that clicking on a symbol on eeschema resulted to enlighten the corresponding footprint on pcbnew and vice versa.
There is a connection between the applications, they talk to each other to cross probe as you have noticed. But netlist data transfer from schematic to pcbnew and backwards is not automatic, it’s done through explicit user action. So when connectivity is changed in schematic it is not immediately reflected in the board and when a reference is changed in the board it is not reflected in schematic, that is until user chooses to update one or the other.
Indeed, the assertion needed an explanation. Changes to each file are independent until transferred explicitly by the user. Even that may change in the future, some users want automatic updates like in some other EDA packages. Net highlighting doesn’t change anything in the files, it’s only temporary help for editing.
personally I do NOT like automatic changes. I experianced this in eagle. While editing the schematic, parts of the layout vanished unnoticed “in the background” though the final (!) result of the changes was not THAT different from the beginning.
Therefore i like KiCads behaviour to transfer changes only when I am ready to do so.
If automatic update is ever added, it would be optional. There has been some talk about that. Not anything realistic, but auto update is a possibility in theory.