Hi, I’ve just changed the grid and I need to change the current grid origin to pad K1
so I change the grid and I need to set the origin to K1. but the cursor will only snap each side, it will not snap to the centre of the pad.
IE in this case, I want snap to pad AND snap to grid, and the snap distance should be such that the centre of the pad can be captured. Ideally the snap to objects should be changable on a keyboard shortcut, or a pop up dialog with a single keyboard shortcut. So I can control w, when there are lots of objects in play which object I am snapping to. There can be lots of layers, and lots of parts and overlapping everything and snapping control needs to be more granular. Here is how it is done in Altium :
And for completeness, If you turn off pads or footprints in the Selection Filter in the lower right corner of the PCB editor, pads can’t be selected, and thus you can’t snap to them either.
This IMO needs to be expanded to all types of objects,. It can be very busy on a dense PCB with overlapping strings, vias, traces, lines, zones, components, etc
One needs to be able to isolate off one at a time.
It needs to be on a panel like properties, so that the user can suspend routing or whatever they are doing, and change the snap / magnet and resume. I see no hot keys available for it current either, it takes about 4 mouse clicks to get there.
This is not the only solution, there are more options in GUI programming. Look how different programs implement it differently.
For the need of improvement on the snapping feature there are some open gitlab issues like:
The current options (kicad v8) you have to control snapping:
snapping completely off (use Shift-key modifier during drawing/moving your operation)
snapping as snap to active layer/ snap to all layers (hotkey)
use dim/hide mode → this snaps only to the displayed layer
utilize the Appearance filter and display only things + layers which you want to snap to. You can define layer-presets (and switch with hotkey CTRL+Tab, not changeable).
snap settings in Preferences. As you said this needs at least 4 mouse clicks. Yes, this is inconvenient (and therefore I very rarely change this setting). Additionally the Preferences dialog got again slow with kicad v8, which makes it more uncomfortable to use.
But as said the feature request on gitlab exists.
