Suggestion: better clickable

I think it would be nice if you could click on the text with the mouse to start a sub-program. See image

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+1. I’ve often thought that as I’ve fallen foul of not being able to !

+1. Did not dare to raise my voice, for I thought I was the only one being annoyed by this tiny issue.

Haha, it used to work this way but we removed it because other people didn’t like it (there were also some bugs IIRC). cc @JeffYoung

I think the problem was that the whole are (row) wasn’t highlighted under the mouse, so some people clicked on it (why?) without knowing it’s a button. The solution is to make the button take the whole width of the panel so that the icon and the text are both inside the button.

That’s unfortunately way harder than it sounds with wxWidgets.

Sorry, I have used only Qt. :smirk:

Extremely easy in Delphi :rofl:

To be clear, it’s perfectly possible in wxWidgets. It just didn’t seem worth spending time on. Anyone would be welcome to make this enhancement as long as you test it works the same way on all 3 platforms.

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The other problem is that the wxWidgets stuff we were using was active in non-front windows. So if the right-hand side of the window was sticking out from behind other windows and you clicked to bring it to the front it would launch an app.

I really hope this is not an indication that KiCad developers are changing things so only “front windows” are clickable. Some of us use “focus follows mouse” so the window where the mouse is positioned has focus, rather than it always being the window in front. Breaking this behavior would be very bad, despite what the idiots managing Gnome (and Apple) believe.

It’s not that; it was just very easy to accidentally launch pcbnew etc while trying to switch back to the project manager window because launcher buttons made up 90% of the area of the window (and weren’t obviously launcher buttons when you could only see a fraction of the window)

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I did see that bug report on gitlab some time ago.
Apparently somebody wanted to click on the window to give it focus, and was annoyed that it actually did something.

And unfortunately it was changed. I also still try to click on the text to execute a program.

When I want to give focus to a (visible) window I usually hover the mouse over it and rotate the scroll wheel.

For a long time I was hoping that the big white area in KiCad V5’s (and earlier) would be put to some good use at some time. Maybe view project notes, or other file preview when it’s selected in the “project tree view”. I do love KiCad, but I do not see this new view of the project manager as an improvement. I used to have the project manager somewhere at the top of the monitor, with only the horizontal bar visible, and it gave me quick access to KiCad’s sub programs. This new project manager has the same (very similar) functonality, but just wastes much more space. Why the long texts? Those would have been just fine in tooltips, and then the text could be normal sized regular buttons.

-1.

@JeffYoung, your explanation changed my mind.

I also keep clicking on the text. Ideally only the boldfaced text (and not whitespace) would be clickable. What is currently a bit deceiving is that when hovering the mouse over the boldfaced text (and also the whitespace to the right of it), a popup help shows,
image
This makes one believe it is clickable. It really only makes sense to show the popup help when hovering above the icon which is capable of this action, and not on the boldfaced line as the italicized explanation below partly duplicates this help text.

It is probably just a matter of time until we learn to only click on the icon, but that somewhat misleading popup help could go away to speed up the process.

I am using win10 and there is no popup. I would be happy if I had this. :smiley:

That is strange, I am using Win 10 here too, KiCad 6.0 stable but also happens in 6.99 nightly when tested. Missing from my screen shot is the mouse cursor hovering over the bold faced text. However I see you are using a German language version - perhaps the translation is not ready yet.

Hi, I found another solution:
Reduce the window so that the text can no longer be seen. See image. That should be enough for now. :grin:

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See Main Project Window: allow access via Click on Text (#8502) · Issues · KiCad / KiCad Source Code / kicad · GitLab
and
Request: Main app launcher icon valid click area (#7946) · Issues · KiCad / KiCad Source Code / kicad · GitLab

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