Been using KiCad for 4+ years now, love it, use it professionally and personally for doing some pretty complex board designs. Came from gEDA originally. The new features I see now so far outpower gEDA it’s not even funny.
But, there’s one feature that gEDA/PCB has that I am hoping gets implemented some day, that I still haven’t seen anywhere - Quick hiding / toggling invisibility of items like reference designators, values, and user fields on the silkscreen layers. Right now if I want a bunch of values (or not have the values), I can’t force hidden layers visible and simply hotkey the item visible. I have to select, edit, toggle visibility (or, worse, select footprint, edit the field, then toggle visibility). Having a hotkey (I would personally use ‘h’) to just hover over a refdes/value and simply have it toggle the visibility (and if you don’t have hidden layers visible, it would just up and dissapear).
I am hopeful I’ll see this some day Thanks for all the work devs!
There isn’t a hotkey that I know of, but you can hide all the items you mentioned by going to the “Items” tab and unchecking the boxes as show in the following screenshot.
I’m not looking to hide a layer or all values, just specific ones. Sometimes I want the values on the PCB directly (but only for certain components), and other times I don’t want the reference designators (I often do this with 0.1uF caps, and just tell the person doing assembly that any 0603 without a reference designator is a 0.1uF 50V cap, etc, because there’s 1000 of them). This is more for specifically toggling the invisibilty flag so they get plotted or not. (And I don’t use force plot values in gerber generation - doesn’t do what I need)
(Most of my work is one-off boards for specialized test equipment, so having values is sometimes very helpful for the manual assembly process).
And yes, there is no hotkey, have looked. Hence the feature request
Why is there no way to edit multiple items of the same class (e.g. references) in one swipe.
Say I have a lot of Cs around a FPGA and dont want them to have a reference (or want to only set a different size for the text).
Atm I have to click on every single one of them, press e, toggle invisible/make the modification and repeat.
Marking multiple and edit them in one swipe would feel natural.
It is possible for vias and tracks, but not for footprint, text.
KiCommand might meet your needs. If it either LayerViewSet or KiCommand do not seem to work with V5, let me know and I’ll try to update them. Include “@” and my user name to make sure I get an email about the topic.
Thanks for all the work devs!