No numeric-input positioning to grid?!?!

Layout
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I think it’s also worth looking at the other context of that sentence:

This kind of thing is why the KiCad team does not do timeline promises (anymore – these used to happen in some cases and they were generally more harmful than helpful).

Nothing is “just around the corner” until it’s already been merged into the nightly builds. I don’t blame @ipmcc123 or anyone else for coming across threads from the past where people predicted new features or changes to KiCad that didn’t exist yet but would “soon”, but I also want to put it out there that these days, the general opinion of the team is that it is not helpful for anyone (KiCad team or just forum users) to post such predictions.

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A few messages down in this thread, I ‘come correct’ on this exact point, based on my own experience being a SWE for decades. I apologize if I offended anyone.

(The following is presented with all sincerity. I am not being sarcastic.)

FWIW, this language irks me a little bit, too. It’s a frequent rallying cry of FOSS projects, but it’s fundamentally flawed. Why? Because, can a random end user really just dive in and implement new features at the drop of a hat? Is that actually realistic?

In my particular case, I was a professional SWE for 25+ years (but I haven’t been for the last decade). I’m probably better equipped than many end users to contribute something, but I’m still essentially not at all equipped to contribute code to a project like KiCad.

I spent most of my SWE career working on macOS apps in Objective-C. I ‘know’ C++ (or at least I used to, ~12 years ago), but even if I were Bjarne Stroustrup himself, it would still take a good deal of time to come up to speed on a package as big and complex as KiCad.

Now, if you had said: ‘Well, despite being forecast 5 years ago as ‘right around the corner’ it hasn’t happened, so either cope, fix it yourself, or stop complaining.’ I would feel like, ‘OK. Sounds good.’ But to say that an end user should feel “joy” to drop everything they’re actually working on, learn to code, learn the ins and outs of a huge package like KiCad, write the code, validate it across 3 platforms, then make a PR, and hope a maintainer agrees to merge it? If that’s “joy” to you, I’d guess that you’re a lot more into yak-shaving than I am. Around 2013 I tried to submit a patch to GDB that reduced a certain process from O(n^3) to O(n^2). I went back and forth for months, only to eventually be told, rather bluntly, that my patch would never be accepted.

Regardless, at this particular moment, I’m not looking for a new hobby, I’m trying to design a PCB with some tight physical tolerances. Thanks to the community on this thread I’ve learned of a number of features I was previously unaware of, and I also have a number of workarounds that get me where I need to go. Thanks to all who helped!

I’m sincerely not trying to be brusque here. However, I feel like ‘Joyfully go forth and implement the feature you want!’ is just as presumptuous (if not more so) than ‘why isn’t this feature that was just around the corner 5 years ago not implemented yet?’

Ian

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It is still just around the corner. The only trouble is that you don’t know around which corner.

If you look at:

Then you’ll find a few thousand open corner you can look behind. Every month some 200 to 300 corners get solved, but about the same amount get created each month too. There have been around 1400 to 1800 open issues for KiCad on gitlab for a bunch of years now ( >2k if you also add the library issues and other miscellaneous things).

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FWIW, this language irks me a little bit, too. It’s a frequent rallying cry of FOSS projects, but it’s fundamentally flawed. Why? Because, can a random end user really just dive in and implement new features at the drop of a hat? Is that actually realistic?

Yes, to some extent. Its just that you most people do not invest any time in trying or understanding the prerequisites. Its not that hard, just not easy either.

However, even if its a bit offensive comment it does underline one thing. If your not participating in doing the development effort then your just a consumer of resources and not necceserily worth listening to. Not necceserily because its offensive. But rather because its the truth, the persons doing things are already at full capacity.

But tis is where i differ, its okay to give feedback. Even talk about what should be as long as you understand that you don’t have a very high value vote because your not funding, or doing the work.

Its not like you telling say microsoft does anything either.

25

Incidentally can you point out where you found this message? This particular feature request has never been something we’ve been actively working on, as far as I know.

26

Wow.

I haven’t worked for Microsoft since the late 1990’s, but when I worked for Apple for the better part of a decade in the 00-10s, there definitely was what we called “bug voting”. In other words, the more end users that filed bugs about something – a missing feature, a bug, a UI change we made, etc – the more attention it got, and the more likely it was to get fixed.

I get it. Put up or shut up. I get it. For now, I’ll work around things.

Regards,
Ian

27

KiCad does bug voting too (on GitLab, not here on this forum). It is one input into how we decide what to work on. Because our issue tracker is public, we can allow people to directly vote on existing issues rather than having to consolidate duplicates ourselves (although that ends up happening when people don’t realize their issue is a duplicate).

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Sure but you have one vote. A person who rolls up selves and does it has way more votes, as in it will get done if you know how to do it. Though even in this case acceptance to the whole is not automatic.

Similarly you can put money towards a feature that also makes your votes count more.

I don’t like this any more than you do but at the end getting things done is not a democracy its a meritocracy (merit being you did it). Trying to learn the internals as we speak so that i could do this.

This particular tool can be made in python so its not like its a big deal to make one that works like you want even without learning how the entire project is made or making one that others like is another thing.

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