Once again a repeat, maybe one year ago I nagged about only some popup windows/dialogs will cancel/close when pressing the ESC key. It’s still the same; why isn’t this consequent through it all, no matter what functions = schematics/symbols/layout etc?
Because nobody has bug reported it? It’s one of those things that requires someone to be an avid user of the ESC key. I myself use Alt-F4 on Windows or just press the buttons most of the time.
Feel free to toss an issue in gitlab, with list of which dialogs dont support it
Thanks. I tried Gitlab a few times, I think also in this topic but probably I’m the only one who uses the ESC key to cancel/escape from often used things and therefore no “bug fix” in this topic. The GUI at Gitlab (text/format) feels like coming to a alien world so no more visit there.
…so no bug report and no resolution.
but probably I’m the only one who uses the ESC key to cancel/escape from often used things
No, you are not the only one. Also for me the “ESC”-key is the most used key (apart from the left mouse-click).
And yes, the ESC-key doesn’t closes all windows under all situations. For instance:
- ERC-rules message-window can’t be closed if the main-canvas was panned/scrolled to view parts of the schematic
- DRC-rules message-window can’t be closed if the main-canvas was panned/scrolled to view parts of the board
- browse footprint library window can’t be closed with ESC
- hotkey-selection-warning-window (“key is already in use. assign anyway/cancel”) can’t be closed with ESC
- symbol editor after invocation from schematic editor (user could think it is a child-window)
- some more
But in summary the ESC-key works pretty well with the most dialog-windows.
Regarding the remaining cases: from a programmers point of view (albeit I do only little microcontroller code, I don’t even get the building system for the monster-codebase of kicad running) I can see reasons why the ESC-key is ignored:
- some windows are not “child-windows” but independent applications (footprint browser, symbol-editor). It’s unusual to close extra applications with ESC, that creates problems if you invoke these applications directly from the kicad manager. (You won’t expect that the application closes on ESC)
- some windows looses the focus during the working process (example with ERC/DRC-message window above). The focus has changed to the main-canvas - it’s difficult to judge that the ESC-key belongs to another window
So thats my reasons why I have no “ESC”-key issue filed until now. If I see an easy to repair example, I will surely report it to gitlab.
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mf_ibfeew, thanks for your reply. Though I’m not a programmer I can only speak as a “user” who wish for some kind of regularity in whatever function we’re talking about – of course I maybe have missed a setting in the preferences or so, and there might be many more things here to mention if so, some of them may be even more important than this little thing but let’s skip them for now, as reporting to gitlab has been paused by me, as I don’t really understand where or what to write in there.
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Users can help with improving KiCad by making good bug reports.
KiCad has a lot of pop-up windows, and hunting down and compiling a list of the windows that mis-behave is probably more work than fixing it. And any user can compile a list of such misbehaving windows.
The first two (ERC and DRC) do not close after panning / zooming because those windows have lost focus. The [ESC] key is sent to the Same with:
- Schematic Editor / Tools / Annotate Schematic
- Schematic Editor / Tools / Update Symbols from Library
- Schematic Editor / Tools / Edit Symbol Fields
- Schematic Editor / Edit / Find [Ctrl + F]
- Schematic Editor / Preferences / Configure Paths
- Pcb Editor / Tools / Cleanup Graphics
… And many more.
I’ve also added the above to:
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