The easiest would be to right click on the layer manager, which pops up a menu with a bunch of presets.
And you can define your own presets in 6.0…
… in the future. …
Yes it’s the easiest… but not easy…
And there will be keyboard shortcuts for those presets in 6.0… right?? 
And when is 6.0 coming out?? 
Follow the discussion in for example Post-v5 new features and development news. And take part in KiCon, I bet it’s the first question in the Q&A
It uses the emacs paradigm. (Other editors also use it, so even if you were never an emacs user you might be familiar with it. Basically you hold the ctrl key down and hit tab and it pops up a list showing your most-recently used presets. Hitting further tabs scrolls down the list while hitting further shift-tabs scrolls back up. The currently selected one is activated when you let up the ctrl key. So it effectively makes toggling between the last two just ctrl-tab, but you can also select others quite easily. It’s easier to use than to describe…)
That’s madness! Please switch to vi paradigm.
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Careful there. Them’s fightin’ words for me.
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Pcbnew has some scripting capabilities.
I’m not well versed into the scripting in KiCad, nor with Python itself.
However…
Is it doable to write a (simple) python script for Pcbnew to do the layer change, and invoke that script with a key combination?
You have to implement a shortcut/hotkey system which can be fully configured. I want to switch between vi and emacs on the fly with a hotkey. But then there’s a difficult problem: should the switching hotkey be emacs-like or vi-like or should it change. Maybe it should be configurable.
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screencast_layerpresets-2020-10-02_22.15.07
I suggest :set dark_mode for switching to Emacs mode and C-M-x redeem to switch back.
May I suggest a compromise. Because the mouse would be configurable, too, the scroll wheel could be used for changing the system. Scrollwheel up = change to emacs, scrollwheel down = change to vi.
Too convoluted. More straightforward approach: Wheel motion (horizontal or vertical) to toggle.
As long as the first toggle always toggles to emacs.
I thought that when in vim mode, you’d need a vim shortcut to switch to emacs.
Or was it that you need an emacs shortcut to switch to emacs for people who only understand emacs, and KiCad becomes completely unusable if they don’t have a shortcut for swithing to emacs?
So confusing.
I don’t care as long as it’s configurable with Lisp.
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