I’ve been using KiCad for a long long time. On several different computers.
I just bought a new HP laptop and installed it. Same version as previously using on my other computers (5.1.9).
Schematic seems fine. But I just went to build a footprint, and all sorts of odd things are happening in the footprint editor:
Moving or copying drawing objects throws them with some offset from where I click. Create Array makes x,y array elements even when I select 1 copy in one of the directions. Ctrl-z does a huge zoom out - like way way out, I almost can’t find the part.
Could this be the computer’s fault? I have never seen these types of editing bugs before. I don’t know how to troubleshoot it.
I did reinstall KiCad… same result.
If anyone has ideas please let me know. If this can’t be resolved I’m going to return the laptop. But you can imagine the push-back I’ll have because they will certainly claim that this is a KiCad issue, not a computer issue. And I don’t have a good argument for that, other than I’ve been using KiCad for years and these issues only occur on this computer.
Shoot of course as soon as I give up an post, I find a solution. The “Modern Toolset (Fallback)” was selected. I changed to the “Modern Toolset (Accelerated)” and it is working normally.
I have never understood the different toolsets…
Does this make sense that one toolset makes the editing controls just do weird things?
Thanks
dan
[Edit] eelik (below) explains it much better than I could. Too many holes in my memory…
Those “toolsets” are partly / mostly there for legacy reasons.
A few KiCad versions back they were called “rendering backends” or something like that.
The reason it changed was that KiCad was using some old stylish GUI libraries that were a dead end and something had to change for KiCad to be able to move forward. As an open source program it is a dilemma, because users are important for testing and trying out new features, but if it does not work propery, then nobody uses it. And also, if it does not work propery and there is no fall back, then you’re pretty much out of luck.
To fix this kind of problem KiCad has adopted a scheme in which you can change the rendering on the fly. If one of the rendering options does not work properly, you select another. Years ago one of the rendering options was called “Cairo”. That option has completely disappeared (at least I think so).
Currently there are 2 options (there used to be 3). The “accelerated” version is the normal, and the “fallback” is an option that is needed for some PC’s with weird (defective?) graphics cards (drivers) (or something).
With the old “Cairo” rendering there were big GUI changes. For example the interactive router did not work at al with that renderer. I think there should be very little to no changes in the GUI whether you choose “fallback” or “accelerated” (Except for rendering speed), but I’m not entirely sure.
Cairo is the fallback. The history goes like this:
There was a way pcbnew way worked and was used, it used a GUI paradigm which wasn’t good. The internal architecture was too limiting to develop it forward. Rendering (showing the view on display) was slow.
New architecture and new GUI paradigm was introduced. That’s why it was called a “toolset” because it had different tools, different human computer interaction.
At the same time for the new architecture the rendering was changed. Using OpenGL, a 3D rendering software/hardware which is hardware accelerated and therefore very efficient, is preferred. But not all user platforms support that or work well with that. Therefore there had to be a fallback, which is Cairo, a 2D graphics library which is implemented in software only. It uses the core CPU and is slower than hw accelerated OpenGL backend.
Because the two big changes – the tool architecture and the rendering backend – were introduced together it caused some confusion for naming: is it toolset or rendering?
In v5.99 (later v6) the legacy toolset has been removed altogether on all platforms.
Cairo backend doesn’t work on Mac, but OpenGL works always because the Mac platform is standardized. In 5.99 the fallback rendering is disabled on Mac AFAIK.
There are plans to use another cross-platform 2D/3D rendering library which then uses the available possibilities of each platform. Then there wouldn’t be need for two rendering backends in KiCad source code. It’s unclear to me if the choice between accelerated and non-accelerated would still be needed.