Right now I am routing a board. In most situations, the dimming of (all but the connection I am working on) is perfectly OK. But my monitor is diagonally up near a window and sun is shining in. I need to see some of the dimmed pads so as to avoid them while routing my track, and it is difficult to see them. Yeah OK I can close the blinds etc. but it would be helpful to reduce or eliminate the dimming when ambient light level is more than ideal.
I’m not sure when this “feature” was introduced.
I’ve been a bit hazy lately and have not used KiCad much, but making everything less visible right when you’re routing tracks is an inexplicable anti-feature to me.
For the same reason I’ve also never used the “high-contrast mode”
(Note that “High-Contrast” mode also modifies the selection filter to exclude stuff from other layers).
I think it DOES MAKE SENSE to highlight what you are doing so that it stands out relative to everything else. The ability to adjust the contrast also makes sense, but I wonder whether other methods might be better such as:
Showing other tracks in outline mode (What if everything is already in outline mode?)
Using a different user selectable color; not necessarily brighter than everything else.
Of course there are other possibilities such as:
3) Making the active track flash somehow. (Ooooh noooo)
All I would like is to have all the pads on the net I am routing highlighted and everything else left as it is.
Trying to place vias between nearly invisible traces on the bottom of the board I ended up with the office windows covered to keep the otherwise very welcome sunlight out.
Highlighted how? If your normal layer color is dimmer than maximum brightness, that is OK. But how to brighten the routing track if everything is already at maximum brightness? I think that is why the others are dimmed.
Brightness is relative.
I don’t like the idea of the background changing color (brightness / shade / whatever) whenever I’m routing a track at all.
I’d prefer to show all that stuff just the same, but indeed, as ltc mentioned. when the (not yet definitive) tracks are being drawn, showing them in a somewhat lighter shade may be useful
Just change the color of all the pads on the net while it is actively being routed. Hopefully a user option to choose the colors as a part of the overall color theme.
Yes I think that some flexible user options for this are the key. If the devs choose one fixed method then many of us will not like it. Change the color of the tracks being routed (or not) and change the color of all others on the same layer (or not) and let us choose the colors. There can be defaults of course. A change in brightness is a different color.
nice, though I would prefer an adjustment bar like for fills. etc.
By the way: whenever I post something I wonder why nobody is interested - the next day I remember many people here live in another place and time ! And thats a great thing !
I’ve never seen real statistics on this, but when I was answering more questions, here, I got the impression that between UTC 16:00 and UTC23:00 was by far the most bustiest time on this forum.
This could be interpreted as European hobbyists tinkering in the evening hours, Americans during the daytime, or the “Far-East” around breakfast.
In addition to just hacking the code, make an issue out of it on gitlab (possibly together with a patch).
If you then post a link here, then I’ll also give it a thumbs up on gitlab.
The most likely final result is probably that it will be made configurable and incorporated in KiCad.
figuring out gitlab was more of a problem than modifying the Kicad source code.
I wanted to list this as a feature request on gitlab but couldn’t find how to do that or if it is even possible.
Unfortunately I do not understand the Kicad source code well enough to offer patches for issues.
