Since some time (or some KiCad version) whenever I move a footprint ratsnest lines practically disappear. This makes it extremely difficult to untangle the connections through the placement of the footprints. How to untangle something you can’t see?
I can’t find how to turn off this annoying feature?
To show how I see it:
Static situation:
And when I start to move:
If you look closely you will see that these lines are still there, but completely useless.
If just a second before I decided to place this resistor over third line to the right how then to do it?
It’s a result of messin’ with themes.
when you are moving a footprint, the ratsnest gets highlighted, which makes all colors lighter. That works well with a dark background, but not with a white background.
You could check wheter there is a bug report for highliting for themes with a light background.
It have to be very dark color. When I change color ‘Value’ from default 128 to 0 the lines are visible during Move but that means normally they are black.
I can think of Value 10 as a kind of highest acceptable value, but normally this lines should not be so dark.
Changing Hue not solves the problem.
Let they be highlighted but all off them. I need all of them during positioning.
At my pictures you also see it. The line going down from left pad disappear when moving.
I have reported my problem:
I didn’t reported 100% disappearing lines as I thought it is the feature that probably was asked for by someone. When moving footprint only the nearest connection is shown. Move toward the other pad with the same net and you will see. I don’t see it useful but may be someone wanted it and we have the effect
Piotr - you may be correct that some find the behavior useful. I would find it useful to have the option for all ratlines to disappear when moving a footprint except for the ratlines connected to that footprint.
21:26 Issue created on gitlab.
22:27 Issue closed with “Fix committed”.
And it links to:
From reading the code, it looks like that for a light background, the highlighted things are made darker instead of lighter. And it’s marked for KiCad V7.0.9. So you can either check a nightly, or wait about a month for the next bug fix release to test it.
Some of the issues I reported were fixed in less then half an hour, and I’ve seen it also happen with other issues. It’s quite common for (small) GUI things to get fixed this quick. But it’s still pretty amazing too.
I think that what is useful for you depends on what kind of PCB you design.
I’m used to 2 layer boards with whole bottom being GND. So I have to design practically single sided with exception that I have GND everywhere. In such design I have to untangle all connections. I have to think of all them all the time so I need to see them all.
If you design 4 or more layer board you can search just the place for element to have the connections short and you don’t wory which way you will connect it as you have several layers and you need not to have connections untangled. In such design seeing only the moved footprint connections and only to the nearest points is helpful.
KiCad should allow for both.
