How to select or delete entire wire in version 8 schematic editor

Schematic
1

Recently picked KiCad back up from using another CAD package (Proteus PCB) for years, so apologies if this is a dumb question.

During schematic editing, when I select a wire without dragging it’s most likely because I want to delete it. If I want to delete it it’s quite likely that I want to delete either the whole wire, or at least the entire section of the wire up to the closest pin or junction (conceptually I want to delete the connection).

What I probably don’t want to do is delete just the segment of the wire between two corners, although I appreciate the ability to do so.

I found this post which suggests pressing U or alt+4, and neither of these seem to work for me. Am I missing something? Is it broken in version 8?

Also if there’s a way to make this the default selection behavior that would be appreciated - I know making features based on what other CAD packages do is potentially dubious, especially when I’ve only been using KiCad 8 for a few weeks, but as I said earlier, conceptually I’m thinking about connections, not wire segments, so the fact that removing a connection takes many button presses instead of two (click, delete) is a bit of a PITA.

2

For me, neither work either.

The U key to select / expand a selection only works in the PCB editor. In the schematic editor it is assigned to changing the reference designator. [Alt + 4] is assigned to two different functions, and apparently the “Cycle fast grid” function has precedence.

You can re-assign hotkeys in … / Preferences / Preferences / Hotkeys It’s a big list, and many functions don’t have a default hotkey. You can sort the list by clicking on one of the column headers. I re-assigned the key to resolve the double [Alt + 4] key assignment, and after that the function works pretty similar to the “expand selection” in the PCB editor.

3

Alt + 4 should work but it looks like the defaut association is also for Alt + 4 to . . .

image

Which it does for me.

You could assign a different hotkey.

4

Thanks both, that will speed things up nicely.

For anyone else reading this, the setting that allows you to select the whole wire is called “Select Connection” in the hot key editor.

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