IEEE/IRE Report of 1926 depicting it (I don’t know of earlier reports or later standards that use it).
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As an insulator collector I’m impressed with the variety of colors you chose for the insulators on the model poles. For the 1920s, that would have been fairly accurate (but a few greens mixed in would be even better).
This is one of those weird things where I don’t honestly think it’s remotely useful but I’d kinda love it to exist anyway. They’re charming. And would genuinely improve readability on the schematics I occasionally print large-format with my HP pen plotter 
Hi, I once asked a SW guy to implement a “blinking” for a power LED to indicate the product is still in production mode, he wasnt happy about the additional work.
When the new parts arrived they were blinking S-O-S. I asked “why SOS ??” and he answered: "blinking is boring, I wrote a subroutine that converts ASCII strings to Morse and transfers them to any port I like !
So, maybe some useless code is acceptable and indeed “charming”. 
obligatory XKCD
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As a more serious side note, every coded feature must also be supported even after the original coder doesn’t maintain it any more. Therefore it should be thought twice before implementing something “just because it’s nice”. Removing an optional hop-over feature afterwards would be difficult even in case it would be tedious to maintain.
My 2c on this:
First: KiCad6
Then: hop-overs, optionally, to make the people happy who like hop-overs.
If its optional, I really don’t see the problem. In fact, for this kind of somewhat divisive, no clear correct answer kind of topic isn’t it in fact the correct thing to do to make it an option, and thereby extend the appeal of KiCad to more users?
After all, KiCad supports both metric and imperial units, and it has both US and EU style circuit symbols… so there is a good tradition in being inclusive already in KiCad. Why not extend it to this topic?
I think that the argument in favor of metric and inches is more persuasive. Some ICs are dimensioned in mm while others are in inches. I end up changing my pcb editor and footprint editor back and forth as a result. I bet that doing as I do in this regard is common if not universal.
Internally, KiCad stores all dimensions in nanometers. The conversion to millimeters or inches and back is common to all display and entry functions. It would be a relatively small change to add support for cubits or micro-furlongs.
Adding graphic support for hop-overs is not trivial. First, it would be necessary to develop an algorithm to identify such cross-over locations. Then an algorithm would need to be developed to calculate an appropriate hop-over arc such that it didn’t confuse the visual presentation. This is non-trivial, and would be used by only a tiny subset of the user base.
With so much development needed to enhance commonly-used KiCad features, I seriously doubt the core developers would devote resources to this. If some individual feels hop-overs are desperately needed, they can do what I did when I was irritated by the direction of the Y-axis: develop the code to support the feature yourself and submit it for review and possible integration. That’s the benefit of open-source development.
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RRPollack, just gave you a heart.
This subject is so fringe that the earlier decision to close the thread was correct. Perhaps 0.01% of designers need “inclusion” here. In my 40+ years of electronics development I may have seen “hop-overs” two times. On top of that, model railways now come into play?
Please, close this thread, close this subject, and if someone feels “excluded”, let them go to court somewhere.
The metric/imperial red herring suddenly thrown in is just troll bait.
I thought it has already become obvious that this thread wasn’t meant to be serious. Relax.
He he… I was schooled by another insulator collector. 
That line was initially built with CD 133.4; replacements from 1884 would have been CD 145; CD 152 from 1912; and CD 154 from 1921.
Early insulators blue or green; CD 154 blue, green or dirty white.
[For those of you that think this is off-topic, keep in mind that many of the features I write for you guys are off-topic for my use of KiCad.]
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What about 13ths of a light year?
[quote=“ML9104, post:52, topic:31372”]
Please, close this thread, close this subject, and if someone feels “excluded”, let them go to court somewhere.
[/quote] 
I think that is making too much of it though…
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Which topic is that?
I’ve never seen blue or green insulators in my part of this world.
Only ever seen dark brown or white.
It is amazing what one can learn from a hop-over poll! 
Back to the hop-over topic, related to referencing published works… I thought I would see how Forrest Mims drew schematics in his engineer’s handbooks. Yes, I know Mr. Mims isn’t an authority, but many of us here in the US (I honestly don’t know how internationally published his books were/are) got our start as kids buying his handbooks from Radio Shack which would have been formative in our schematic stylings. Well… I can say with confidence that “consistency” is not to be expected from Mr. Mims for unconnected crossing lines.
Check out this two-page spread on archive.org from his “Engineer’s Notebook II”:
https://archive.org/details/EngineersNotebookIIAHandbook/Engineer’s%20Notebook%20II%20A%20Handbook%20Of%20Integrated%20Circuit%20Applications%20-%20Forrest%20Mims/page/n35/mode/2up
Look at the digital stopwatch schematic on the bottom of page 37. It has crossing, unconnected lines above the IC and hop-overs below the IC. Elsewhere in the book you will find a 4-way connection with a junction dot. And (I forget if in that book, or one of his others available on archive.org) sometimes the broken crossover. About the only thing that I can see that Mr. Mims does with any consistency is using junction dots to denote a connection of 3 or more lines. His uses all sorts of unconnected crossing line styles.
On a side note, I was really chuffed to find his books on archive.org. Especially now that Radio Shack isn’t a thing anymore.
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The UK hobby electronics magazine Practical Electronics (PE) is still using hops (but not on free online content or when it was called EPE, it seems; maybe depends on author or publisher).
I got my start with copying schematic diagrams out of Popular Electronics / Computer & Electronics (Mims was a columnist for that publication), and back then I used gaps, then I switched to hop-overs.
I still use hop-overs when I’m doing a quick reverse-engineer sketch, but in KiCAD, I now prefer a plain crossing, relying instead on the “abhorred” junction dot to show where the lines do connect.
What could be referred to as the bible of electronics: Horowitz & Hill, the art of electronics uses blobs.
Much appreciated
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The hobby electronics magazines seem to have been the main users of hop overs.
As has been pointed out above, code to draw them would have to take into account the neighbouring wire lines as a hop over can all too easily end up overlapping a nearby junction dot
Nah it shouldn’t have to do that. Jumps are an artistic decision by the person drawing the schematic, they can arrange it in a way that’s visually appealing and legible.
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