Something like a hot key to change the color of a wire up to the next junction or full wire to the next terminus?
When doing a schematic review, it would be useful to tick mark wires and connections that have been checked. Then when the check is complete, just clear all tick marks and proceed. At present, i print out a list of nets and then cross them off the paper list
Also when laying out a schematic, sometimes want to drop a marker to remember to come back and revisit a connection I am not sure about.
You can place the mouse cursor on the line, press ‘E’ to edit it and change the Color.
You can Window-Box multiple items and ‘E’ to do them in bulk. If you don’t save the file, they will revert to unsaved state…
Thanks, a good option. Is there a hotkey to change a wire back to default type/color? that way i can change color of all wires and then when checked just use a hotkey to restore. E and selecting the color is not overly burdensome, but when there are thousands of wires, a one keystroke solution would be just that much nicer. thanks.
Well it would be easy to do this for symbols, but not for wires. Likewise in the pcb editor its relatively easy to do for footprints, but not for traces.
If you never ever color any wires then it would be possible to do this. But it would break the moment somebody has used other custom colors or two reviewers want to review one thing.
If you could add properties for individual wires then this would be relatively easy to do. Maybe this should be a enhancement request. Something like this would allow for saving selections and adding annotations that are semantically connected to the elements in the schematic and PCB
It’s not a Graphic’s edit-program but, perhaps this will add to your toolbox…
And, look at the Checkbox to use ‘Only Include Selected Items’
Thanks for the suggestions
Yesterday I completed a review for a few hundred wires and here is the sequence that i have found works best for me, but it is still extremely clumsy to implement—
in preparation for the review, i use a select all wires to change the color of wires on the entire page.
after wire is checked, i select and then expand the selection using Alt+4 and “E” and click ‘default’ then ‘ok’. it is a lot of clicking for each wire, but it works. to make matters worse, unfortunately, kicad frequently fails to select the entire net, e.g., when labels are used to continue the net somewhere else on the page. this means that everyplace that net shows up but is not physically connected by a direct wire, the color is not changed back to default (particularly annoying for buses). also, the Alt+4 hotkey only extends the selection one segment at a time, so for a complicated net it can take a couple dozen Alt+4 strokes to get the whole thing selected.
Another way of checking, is to export the netlist to a text file, open it in a text editor and do the notes in there. You can combine this with the search and net highlight in KiCad to find things, but I guess this only works with the named nets.
If you’ve already drawn the PCB, you can also make use of the net inspector.
If I were going to do this…
I would make a .pdf of the schematic and then open the .pdf in Foxit Reader which is my default .pdf editor.
I have kept an older version of Foxit; Version: 9.7.2.29539 You may be able to find a download online for this older version.
This older version is capable of producing .pdfs (I can "print to Foxit .pdf for example). It also has significant commenting capabilities. I think that newer versions can comment also but Foxit seems to have withdrawn the ability of the reader to produce .pdf files.
So this is like producing a hard copy and marking it with a pen or marker, except that the print is only a soft copy. One advantage is that the comments can be deleted or moved if you marked something erroneously for example.
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