Moved from Kicad 5 to Kicad 7

In kicad 5 when you selected something it automaticaly starts moving with mouse after selection. This is crucial to me.
also when i holded shift and select something it duplicate it, this is also missing in V7. Also when i hold ctrl and moved with something it holded connections, in V7 i cannot setup “ctrl” to that…
How do i set it up?

thanks for help

How do i set it up?

The User interface was extensively changed during the kicad development from v5–>v6.
You will not get the exact old behaviour back.

If you are willing to adapt to the new workflow you could play a little bit with the Preferences (maybe this improves the kicad behaviour):

  • Preferences–>mouse&touchpad–>drag gestures
  • Preferences–>common–>Editing–>first hotkey selects tool on/off
  • Preferences–>pcb editor–>editing–>CTRL has two options for the CTRL-key modifier (but non for CTRL==drag mode)

For the drag-mode I recommend the use of the explicit drag-hotkey (“G” as standard).

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I explained this change in KiCad 6: Just published my BIG *preview* review - #44 by eelik.

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Ok, is possible to setup “first hotkey selects tool on/off” for traces to act like in V5? becouse when i want something to extend it works, but when i move in the way of traces, traces holds its lenght. And when they exceed other element, in thic case TH1 it shorted him.
In V5 it nicely adjust its lenght itself.

this should be repaired

You should give yourself some time to adjust to the new added features and functionality.
The behaviour in the schematic editor depends on the current selected drawing mode, which you can set on the left toolbar:

  • drawiing with any angle (this is a little bit similar to v5)
  • drawing restricted to 90° wires (new mode in v7)
  • drawing restricted to 45°+90° wires (new mode in v7)

Additionally the dragging behaviour depends on the selection itself.
In your picture the selection includes probably the left horizontal wires.
If you make a boxselection which doesn’t includes the left horizontal wires then you may get the behaviour you want

But a general “this should be repaired” is not really helpful. You have to make a exact description of your actions and what do you expect from the dragging algorithm.

I tried dragging a bit, and I find the same difficulty than WHY did. Wires should shorten when they end in a corner or another wire/crossing and are pushed over that point. Now they do what is seen in the screenshot above: it moves over that point. IMO this is a bug. Changing the selection doesn’t help.

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Is enough to just mention it here or shall we report this bug somewhere else?

@mikebwilliams coded orthogonal wire stretching for v7, maybe he still remembers something about it and could say something? In general bugs should still be reported to the issue database unless it’s a small change which some developer happens to make right away. You could of course search in the database to see if this has already been reported.

So what happened is that kicad used to have a very well working user interface, that had a good usage feeling to it. It was just rather quirky. Now what they have succeed in doing is to make the UI slightly more mainstream, but in turn more clunky for legacy reasons.

Dont take me wrong it works. But it was definitely a huge shift in way that did not feel good at first. one adapts. But realistically kicad project would really need some software ergonomics analysts/ designer.

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