Post-v5 new features and development news

New eeschema selection highlighting.
Browse button in Sheet Properties dialog.
Filters in Footprint Browser.
Control over 3D Model updating in Update Footprints and Change Footprints.
Preference for whether Flipping a footprint to the back of the board flips it top/bottom or left/right.
Undo/redo while editing schematic text objects.

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6 posts were split to a new topic: Selection highlighting in development version

Could this be cherry picked to 5.1 nightly?

Sadly, no. 5.1 doesn’t really have selections at all, depending instead on block commands and a “current item”. 6.0 Eeschema is based on the modern toolset from Pcbnew, with a first-class selection model.

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No prob. Thanks :grinning:

Jp charras is working on a board stack-up manager. It’s not in the master branch yet but should be quite soon. Here’s a screenshot or two (self-compiled on Linux with patch):

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Paste Special lets you keep schematic annotations in copied symbols when pasting.

image

(@JeffYoung, the checkboxes should be changed to radiobuttons because they are exclusive.)

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Will this also affect the 3D visualization and the File>>Export models?

Interesting.
A idea is add (this will be a checkbox) “fill with not used parts of multi-parts components”. What I want is be possible to place the same circuit but using the next A-B-C-D part of an IC (example a operational amplifier).
Also could be add <Ctrl>+<Shift>+v as default hotkey for this function.

Finally, this has been a glaring omission for a long time.
I have a 2mm board so I have to get notepad++ out on the pcb file

In v5.1.4 you can edit the thickness of the board in File->BoardSetup->Layers

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I never noticed that setting before. Still limited when you have 4 layer or more.

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It’s available for Windows in https://kicad-downloads.s3.cern.ch/index.html?prefix=windows/testing/patched/, build #497.

EDIT: it has been committed to master branch and should be in the next nightly build.

Radio buttons have to encode all options, so there would need to be a third for “Clear annotations if there are any duplicates”.

In this case I think 2 checkboxes has a bit better SNR than 3 radio buttons.

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As was found out in another thread, KiCad has semi-supported bezier curves for some time in graphics layers. Now v5.99 can both edit and plot them (previously plotting footprints didn’t work).

KiCad can’t create bezier curves, but if you import them from another graphics format (i.e. DXF or SVG) you can edit them by dragging the points.

EDIT: the fix was taken into 5.1 branch, too. 5.1.5 will plot bezier curves, but there’s some bug left to be fixed for 5.1.6.

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This isn’t a “new feature” but definitely “development news”. As many of you know, there has been discussion about moving KiCad development from Launchpad to Gitlab.

Maciej Suminski has done some work to see how to move the bug tracker. See https://lists.launchpad.net/kicad-developers/msg42502.html and follow the second link to see and test the features. At first sight it looks promising.

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Project Save As is in. It could use a lot of testing…

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Save As was a top ten wanted feature, so this is great news.

(See https://bugs.launchpad.net/kicad/+bug/594051, it’s educating to read also to understand the KiCad project a bit better, if you haven’t familiarized yourself yet with how the wishlist and KiCad development work. You can also see why it can look simple but isn’t and needs a lot of testing.)

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Those who compile KiCad but don’t follow the developers mailing list actively must read this: https://lists.launchpad.net/kicad-developers/msg42941.html. Most of you already know that the project has been in the process of moving to gitlab, but now it’s happening for real.

This is already pinned: Symbol Library Editor Changes, but here it is again: as a first step towards new library file format the concept of alias has been removed and inheritance is used instead. Notice that this still works on top of the old file format, so it doesn’t have much features.

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