Pcbnew menu - Preferences

Am I alone in thinking that Preferences is a very strange choice for a menu list including library wizards and 3D Shape downloader

Some of the items in Dimensions might be more logically here

2 Likes

Nope you are not alone here. I have the feeling that a lot of new kicad users struggle with stuff like that. (We get a lot of questions that seem related to people not finding some of these tools.)

Yes, there are some GUI issues for sure. This is one of them.

No, you’re not. I’ve wanted to rearrange the preferences in pcbnew, including moving things that aren’t preferences out, for quite a while now - it’s just that preferences are an absolute mess in pcbnew right now spread between GAL and legacy and I’ll just contribute to the spaghetti pile if I start messing with it. Once things are cleaned up, that area will be due for a huge fixup.

1 Like

I expect that as the application integration moves closer, that library management should become a project level activity in its own menu item

We now have symbols, footprints, 3D models, ngspice and possibilities of manufacturing data

3 Likes

I’m looking forward to that one. Will be very interesting to get all those things under one roof.

Agree that ‘Preferences’ are a bit of a mess!. There is a ‘Preferences’ menu in the project manager but no preferences menu where an OS X user would expect it - under the ‘KiCad’ menu item. In eeschema there are two preference menus. In Part Library editor (odd name) there are no ‘Preferences’ under Kicad but there are ‘Component Editor Options’ - and a Preferences menu…
Bitmap2 comment - no preferences at all
Gerbv - 2 locations.
And does anyone seriously have a use case for different language settings for Eeschema and Pcbnew?!

1 Like