My schematics get rather complex, and I’d like to change groups of traces and busses to different colors other than the default green for individual wires and blue for busses.
I can easily see how to do this in the properties. For example, this box for changing a bus color
But let’s say I want to change the color of an entire bus to orange. I can highlight the bus with the ` key, and it turns purple showing the whole bus across the schematic:
But when I go to change the color to, say, a reddish-orange, it only changes a “section” of the bus where I clicked on properties, not the whole thing:
I understand that busses, like wires, are made up if sections, separated by every corner and every connection. For this bus, there are dozens, if not over a hundred sections.
How can I “select all sections” in this bus, to change the color of the entire bus at once?
I can highlight the bus with the ` key, and it turns purple showing the whole bus across the schematic
False approach. Highlighting is a visual effect only.
You need to select the whole bus, than use the “properties”-dialog to change width/color.
To select the bus: LMB-click one segment (now this segment is selected), RMB-click → context-menu–> Expand connection (standard hotkey: ALT+4). Now the complete bus is selected.
optional different solution/workflow: assign a different netclass to the bus (or other nets) and change the default-color for these netclass.
Thank you so much! This partially works, but seems to not be able to select anything past the T-intersections. Here’s a video showing exactly what I mean, and my work-around to still get the job done.
for the following advice you need a working “select connection”-hotkey. If the standard hotkey (Alt+4, not Alt+F4) doesn’t works, maybe try a different hotkey-setting (see picture).
With a working hotkey for the “select connection”-command you invoke the command multiple times after another, each time the selection is expanded until the next T-section-branch. So with your example-video: 5times “Alt+4” and the whole bus is selected.
For the missing context-menu-entry if multiple segments are already selected: there is already an open gitlab-feature request to implement “select connection”-command for multiple selections (this also includes expanding different nets/busses at the same time):
Hover mouse anywhere on wire or bus and don’t bother moving it, hold down Alt and keep tapping 4 until the whole bus/wire is highlighted, then select properties.
