Near the end of a PCB design process, and prior to generating Gerbers, I’m accustomed to checking each footprint for proper component designator placement.
I do this to:
Confirm the footprint designator has not been placed near the wrong component.
Make sure the placement of the designator text (and possibly the component value/parameter text) is efficient.
In some unnamed other CAD package, I would be able to list all components, click on each one, auto-zoom to said component and have its visible parameters high-lighted automatically.
With the likely possibility that I am missing something (or my forum search-skill is low), is there a way to do this in KiCad?
This isn’t exactly what you’re asking for but it’ll get you most of the way there, I think:
Set up your view settings to hide stuff you don’t care about, and/or set your single-layer view mode as you like (I like “Dim” for this). If there’s a set of layers that you would always use for this, you can create a view preset (or maybe one of the existing presets will work for you).
Open the search panel (view → show search panel) and select the footprints tab. With no search terms entered, this is a list of all the footprints in the design.
When you click on a footprint in the list, it will be highlighted along with all of its fields. In combination with single-layer view mode this makes it easy to see what you care about. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to zoom/pan to the component (I think this would be a good feature request). You can use the arrow keys to quickly scroll through the list.
