I first installed KiCad sometime ago on my desktop but never really got into it as I didn’t really know how to drive the software.
Since Chris was kind enough to release the videos from the course I thought I would give it another go, plus I don’t have access to works Altium license anymore as I’m off travelling but I as I’m going light I will only have my laptop to work on.
What is it like to use on a lower res (1366x768) screen? Altium was bit of a pain as there are quite a few menus and toolbars that you can hide but to get the job done quickly I had them open.
Is KiCad usable at this resolution?
It can be a bit of a pain, some of the tools get hidden because the toolbars don’t scale very well, certainly on Linux they aren’t relocatable or configurable at all which isn’t great.
Once you get into using KiCAD though you don’t often need the toolbars, I tend to do layout with one hand on the keyboard and one on the mouse, just use the keyboard shortcuts to select tools and switch layers. I’ve done a fair bit of work on my laptop (1280x800) and even done a bit on my netbook (1024x600).
The most productive is obviously with two big screens because the schematic and PCB auto-zoom feature is really handy.
I have been using it on a 1280x800 screen and it works great. I use a tiling WM (Xmonad) on Linux so that saves a bit of space.
That’s one of the things that has stopped me from trying Altium actually: I hear it’s terrible for small screens. (Also it’s proprietary, Windows only etc…)
Another thing to consider about KiCad though, which may not be immediately obvious, is that the new CERN features require a minimum OpenGL version (can’t remember which of the top of my head) so they won’t work on my older laptop for instance.
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Kasbah, I saw your comment from last year regarding OpenGL and old laptops, and I wanted to share my experience with you. I have a laptop that is about 10 years old (dual-core Pentium with 1 (one) GB RAM), and I just installed Fedora 21 64bit on it (the full Gnome version). That ran too slow, so I changed to the LXDE spin. That is now running just fine, and I have just installed Kicad v. (2015-mar-04 BZR unknown). I have since created a small schematic, created a board for it, and just viewed it with the 3D Viewer. I AM AMAZED! It all ran just fine. Great, even.
I just wanted to encourage people to use a distribution that caters to older hardware and reap the rewards.
If I remember correctly, it needs openGL 2.1 or higher.
and so what …?
you leave it …
nobody can solve this problem…?
i have 1366x7678 and if i disable border tow icon on both toolbar…
i have to rotate screen to use strip tools…
1366 x 7678 Really? I see the problem with the small height of 768 pixels. “Contrast mode”, “Show / hide Layer manager” and “differential pair routing” are not accessible.
1366x768…
witch point of kicad are focesed to develop that ui doesnt improve as need as users
I understand that you are not happy about this issue. But I also see that 768 pixels in screen height is very little and from my point of view too little for a computer to be used for CAD. Anyways - making the buttons detachable or resizable would require quite a lot of changes in the background and is thus most likely not flagged with a high priority. The fact that screen resolutions typically go up not down with newer computers, I think this will not be changed at all… (Even my oldest phone has a higher resolution).