You are doing your regular PCB stuff. You press M here and an R there, and suddenly your ground zone dissapears. Well it does not dissappeared, it rotated because your mouse was just of that little 0402 resistor when you hit R. So instead of rotating that little resistor, you just rotated your zone…
I don’t experience this that often, but I think it is tad strange that is too easy to accidently move or rotate a zone.
So I was thinking to make the zone harder to select when you are closer to it’s edges or something. That would seem an easy fix to me.
And I am wondering does anybody actually ever move or rotate a zone? I use the white control points to resize, but never have I ever moved or let alone rotated a zone with M or R.
This is one of my small nuisances too. In older KiCad versions, a zone could only be selected by clicking on it’s edge and I was perfectly fine with that, but somebody complained about it on gitlab and unfortunately it was changed.
But you can unselect zones in the Selection Filter in the lower right corner of the screen. If zones are unselected, they can’t be selected. This works, but you have to toggle that checkbox each time you want to modify something on a zone.
Another option is to unfill the zones (CTRL-B unfills all zones, B fills them again). The zone outlines are still visible and can be selected by their edges if necessary.
In the right click context menu when you hover over a zone there is the option to unfill selected zones
right click->Zones->Unfill Selected Zone(s)
A downside to this method is that it shows the ratsnest lines associated with the zones.
I did a gitlab search, and it was changed about 4 years ago, and introduced in KiCad V5.
And even: Wayne Stambaugh (stambaughw) wrote:
The zone select behavior could be optional for those who prefer it. I have the same objection as Michael as I too typically have power planes that take up the entire board.
It would be relatively easy to add a user setting in the preference whether zones can be selected only by their edges, or on the whole zone. The only problem with this, is that when KiCad is configurable on this level, the amount of settings in the preferences may explode, some settings may conflict and add bugs.
I am not sure whether that is all worth it. I preferred the old behavior myself, but can live with the new behavior.
So I’ll make it a vote.
If you want to have a user setting to return to the old behavior where a zone could only be selected by it’s edge, then give this post an upvote (the hart at the bottom). And if it collects a bunch of those, I will make a feature request on gitlab, where it can accumulate more upvotes.
