I have just bought a Logitech RGB backlit keyboard that has the ability to change the colours of the backlighting on a key-by-key basis according to what application has focus (fancy!). I would ideally like to separately set-up colour schemes to highlight the keyboard shortcuts in eeschema and pcbnew so that I can find them at a glance.
If I start eeschema or pcbnew independently of the main kicad interface, the Logitech software can identify when they have focus and all works well. However if I start them from the main KiCad interface then the keyboard software does not identify them as they are started as subprocesses of the main KiCad program.
This is a bit of a longshot, but is there a hidden setting that I can use to start eeschema and pcbnew as distinct processes from the main KiCad interface? Does anybody have any other ideas how I might workaround the issue?
The programs need to be part of the same process to allow the needed communication for features like cross highlighting and updating the pcb from schematic. Meaning it is not really a good idea to do what you want to do. (Unless you want a massively reduced feature set.)
Might be better to find some way to tell your tool it should look at the active window instead of the active program. (The operating system should know the name of the active window so there should be some way to identify it. But that might be something for the support forum of your keyboard.)
Agreed - that would be a better way for the keyboard lighting software to work, and some users have proposed it but it has not gained any traction. I guess it is a niche request.
I know that there is an SDK to support the development of software to control the keyboard lighting. Perhaps it would be possible to develop plugins for eeschema and pcbnew to do it but I am unsure from the KiCad documentation whether there is an appropriate event for me to hang some code on. I can find references to functions that control what happens when the programs start and finish, but nothing that would allow me to detect when they have received focus.