Nice, I remember had participated on this discussion on Gitlab.
The footprint library browser now has the same tools and options that the “Assign Footprints” footprint viewer does - including the measure tool. Also both the footprint library browser and the “Assign Footprints” footprint viewer no longer have a separate options dialog - all those settings now exist as toolbar icons in the windows (the only new ones are for showing pad numbers and automatically zooming the view to fit the footprint).
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There’s a new panel for configuring mouse and touchpad behavior.
As part of this, you can now configure whether the middle and right buttons pan, zoom, or do nothing when you drag them. You can also customize the modifier key behavior of the vertical scroll wheel / vertical touchpad dragging. This replaces the “use touchpad to pan” setting.
You can also adjust the speed of zooming, and the speed of the automatic pan while moving objects (if you have that enabled)
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You can now cross-probe highlight buses in PcbNew instead of just nets. This feature is a bit limited at the moment: you can’t actually see the bus info in PcbNew (what members it contains, etc). This will be added later.
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An “information bar” is being introduced in all the windows to display some warning and error messages in a more unobtrusive way than dialog boxes (so that window focus doesn’t change because of the notification).
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Wayne has announced two new features:
Exclude from BOM - the part doesn’t go to the bill of material, good for example for mounting holes.
Exclude from board - the part doesn’t go to the netlist. Good for example for symbols which have a part but not a footprint, like mounting screws or enclosures which you want in the BOM.
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Here useful. I just thinking how to future modify this by a variant system and right would be useful those just option check boxes as columns in the “Symbol Fields” Table dialog. I will test and rise this issue for implementation.
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Fast grid switching (and user grids) for Eeschema.
Intrepid geeks might also notice that the grid and zoom lists are now in the JSON preferences files (and can be changed there).
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Fast grid switching (and user grids) for Eeschema.
Warning to users: Be careful with user grids. The way wires/buses are connected to pins is if the end of the wires are on the same coordinate as the pin (same with wire-to-wire). This means that if a custom grid is used, you need to ensure your wires/buses/pins all align properly.
I thought that object snap was also coming in EESchema? That should help ameliorate grid/pin mismatches.
It has been discussed in the dev team (actually just tonight because of this), and it looks like we want to do it, but we just need to do a bit of cleanup before we can actually implement it.
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Nice! Needs to have a keyboard shortcut for it though.
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Rectangle tool in Footprint Editor.
(You can also use Edit > Cleanup Graphics… to “heal” existing line-based rectangles into rectangles.)
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If you had something like a grid of lines, like a spreadsheet pattern, how would it handle that? or would it just heal the outer rectangle.
Good question. If the algorithm is based on begin-end points of the lines, I would guest that will convert just the externals (of each composition) but I need to test.
There are now configuration options in Eeschema and PcbNew to control cross-probing behavior:
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Also thinking if this could represent some significative size reduction of the footprint library total package size when v6 became the stable (and the v5 library format could be updated, prioritizing squares over 4-lines).
I would also expect it will heal only the outside rectangles. But I didn’t test that case. 
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- Copper zones can now fill more than one layer
- Copper zone island removal is now configurable
- Copper zones and keepouts now have an optional name property (for future use with the new DRC system)
Multilayer zone demo:
multilayer
Island settings demo:
island_settings.m4v
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