As can be seen in the images below:
Available buttons are sketch pads, vias and tracks. While there are available other sketch functions, users are not aware of them since there are no buttons, at least. If the user doesn’t visit the hotkeys settings, they won’t be aware of those functions.
The available buttons are only a small subset of all available commands. There are 250 pcbnew-specific hotkeys + 100 common hotkeys, so in total ~~ 350 available commands. Placing 350 buttons on the the GUI would reduce the available canvas space a little bit.
Using pcbnew is very well possibly without these commands/buttons. And from a experieced user (or someone who wants to become experienced) I expect some effort to learn the hidden parts of a complicated CAD-software.
datapoint for usage these commands: I have never used the available (pad,track, via) nor the additional (graphic/text) sketch/outline commands.
My personal summary: I think this can only be solved if sometime in the future we get customizable button bars, from issue Feature Request: Able to customize the toolbar (#9852) · Issues · KiCad / KiCad Source Code / kicad · GitLab
seriously 
if the function is neither accessible thru buttons nor preset keyboard shortcuts, not even accessible thru menues, and your justification is you are expecting the user to dig deeper in ctrl + F1 list!!??
use a narrator and lsn to urself 
you are saying that the users should dig deeper and seek the functions that they don’t know about, get amazed, be thankful and then assign a keyboard shortcut, sth you were not even able to do coz you have run out of shortcuts (may be)…
if you’re running out of space, make it available thru menues at least…
The space in menus is limited also. We have a lot more functionality in KiCad than most users need, so we only put the most useful subset in menus and toolbars. These particular options are not ones that most people need to use.
You could create a Plugin containing Panels with Buttons to call the standard kicad routines and/or custom code…
Example showing buttons, some of which call routines and stand-alone App’s…
Naturally, you can code any panel shape/orientation/etc…
This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.
