This certainly looks like unintentional behaviour / “a bug”.
KiCAD’s version info:
Application: kicad
Version: 5.1.0-060a0da~80~ubuntu18.04.1, release build
Libraries:
wxWidgets 3.0.4
libcurl/7.58.0 OpenSSL/1.1.0g zlib/1.2.11 libidn2/2.0.4 libpsl/0.19.1 (+libidn2/2.0.4) nghttp2/1.30.0 librtmp/2.3
Platform: Linux 4.15.0-46-generic x86_64, 64 bit, Little endian, wxGTK
Build Info:
wxWidgets: 3.0.4 (wchar_t,wx containers,compatible with 2.8) GTK+ 3.22
Boost: 1.65.1
OpenCASCADE Community Edition: 6.9.1
Curl: 7.58.0
Compiler: GCC 7.3.0 with C++ ABI 1011
Build settings:
USE_WX_GRAPHICS_CONTEXT=OFF
USE_WX_OVERLAY=ON
KICAD_SCRIPTING=ON
KICAD_SCRIPTING_MODULES=ON
KICAD_SCRIPTING_PYTHON3=ON
KICAD_SCRIPTING_WXPYTHON=ON
KICAD_SCRIPTING_WXPYTHON_PHOENIX=ON
KICAD_SCRIPTING_ACTION_MENU=ON
BUILD_GITHUB_PLUGIN=ON
KICAD_USE_OCE=ON
KICAD_USE_OCC=OFF
KICAD_SPICE=ON
My platform is Ubuntu 18.04 running Unity desktop.
The one thing that is particular about my setup is that I use larger menu fonts and icon sizes in the desktop setup (1.25 in this case, because the resolution is 2560x1440 — in 4k monitors I need to go as high as 1.5 to be able to read the screen text):
I suspect that the issue may be related to this. Look at these screen captures from KiCAD windows.
In the following screen capture, the text on the right-side area is the normal text size on my screen; look at how tiny the text on the left is (the list of files):
Look at the “About” window. The text at the top ((C) 1992-2019 KiCad Developers ···
) and the captions in the buttons at the bottom show at normal size; look at the tiny size of the captions of the tabs, and the contents inside the tabbed area:
If I reset my desktop / display properties back to a scale factor of 1, I still see a small difference in font size, but not as bad. For example, this is one of the windows that looked particularly horrible with my original scale=1.25 settings, and it only looks slightly-odd with the scale=1 settings (one can certainly tell that the font size in the “spreadsheet” view / symbol properties is noticeably smaller; but it’s not a huge difference):
Another reason why I suspect that it may be a bug, and not intended look/behaviour, is a problem with some selection lists; for some reason, right now I can only partially reproduce the odd behaviour, but I assure you that I did not imagine it :-). Inside pcbnew, I go to the menu Place → Footprint
. The list of footprints, which has a “preview” area on the right, behaves oddly. The preview on the right shows only the second time that I click on an item. For example, if I expend the section Capacitor_SMD
; I click on C_0201_0603Metric
and nothing shows on the right; then I click anywhere else, and click back on C_0201_0603Metric
, and now the footprint shows on the right. Same for every item (well, even more oddly, there are some exceptions — for example, going line by line from C_0201 down, C_0402_1005Metric showed at the first click, and C_01005_0402Metric showed at the first click; C_1806 also showed at the first click. All of the others only show at the second click. Moving the cursor with the arrow keys makes no difference; the first time the cursor lands on an item, nothing shows; if you then do down-arrow followed by up-arrow, then the cursor lands in the item for the second time, so now the footprint shows.
The reason I suspect that this may be related to the same “alleged bug” is that at some point, the display of the list was broken. It is a bit hard to describe — it is as if the real position of the cursor and the displayed items are out-of-sync; as I move the cursor with the arrow, the display refreshes and overwrites all the area from the cursor down (because the cursor was showing, say item #5, but then when I move down, the actual selection is, say, item #8, so the list now refreshes so that from the position of the cursor down, it shows 9, 10, 11…).
This last aspect is the part that right now I cannot reproduce. However, I am 100% certain I’ve seen this on several occasions — not sure how useful this may be; perhaps other users can reproduce this behaviour?