Hi everyone. It seems to me that we have a somewhat inconvenient way of moving the pcb board in the 3D view. I suggest that the developers take a look at how it’s done in JLCPCB. Its just need to add the ability to move the board left, right, up, and down while holding the right mouse button, according to its movements.
Just hold the Wheel instead and move . . .
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Many touchpads don’t have a wheel press button although they scroll with 2 fingers. I would prefer having the same navigation system in the 3D viewer than in the rest of KiCad (the famous scroll to zoom and center).
I can’t scroll with two fingers on a Mac magic mouse.
But the 3Dconnexion SpaceMouse works like a charm in KiCAD. In schematics, layout and 3D view.
You can also press Space to center the view on arbitrary point.
Intuitively, I expect the same behavior as in other 3D modeling programs. Besides, using the scroll wheel for this is inconvenient. Why not make it more logical and user-friendly?
This method is honestly terrible. It somehow reminds me of computers from the early 2000s.
All of these navigation modes in FreeCad use mouse scroll wheel drag without modifiers as “Pan”, like KiCad:
I don’t think there’s a clear winner here, every tool does it differently.
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Then maybe an option could be added so that users can customize it to their preferences?
Like Solidworks . . . where there is no pan option at all ? all software has it’s quirks, there aren’t universal UI behaviours or all software would be the same. Take some time, use KiCad more, get used to it, get some muscle memory.
Make a large enough donation to the folks at KiCad and they will write it just for you . . .
Then maybe an option could be added so that users can customize it to their preferences?
To many options complicate the maintenance of the code, increase the probability of bugs (every combination of options must be tested) and complicate bug reportd/bug reproduction. If every user wants a “option” for his preferred workflow we will end with 999999 (or even more) checkbox settings. So it’s reasonable to have settings only for things a real big part of the community (or paying customers) demands it.
Sometimes a user just has to accept the workflow for a program.
That said you should look into “Preferences–>mouse&Touchpad–>drag gestures”. There are already two options for panning the canvas view around:
- pan with middle mouse button pressed (middle mouse button often combined with scrollwheel)
- pan with right mouse button pressed
So there is already a little customization available.
Sadly this “pan with right mouse button” setting is not respected by the 3D-viewer, this could be worth a bug report. Feel free to open up a gitlab issue (use Help–>Report bug)
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