I’d like to suggest a few features to the developers of KiCad. Is there an official channel to do so?
file with option ‘wishlist’
Search before you post, maybe others had the same/similar idea already and read some replies to a couple of ‘wishlist’ items, so you know what to expect.
Note - highest success of implementation is given for pull requests of code that does what you want.
KiCAD devs work in their freetime, already got their plate full with working on v5 and usually are most motivated to solve their own problems.
PS: if you want to test the waters with your ideas feel free to post them, just don’t expect any dev to turn up here, as we’re ‘support’ 
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I’ve had a look and I haven’t seen any mention of the features I’d like to see added.
I have a fair amount of experience with Adobe Illustrator and I have got used to it’s layout system. I’d love to see similar features in KiCad. For instance, one addition would be constraining. Whilst placing/editing either symbols, footprints or any other graphic parts, I’d love to be able to press the shift key and have the item constrained to move along it’s x or y axis at 90 degrees. This could be further developed by making the constrain angles customisable.
Another thing I’d like to see is the ability to select a group of items and align or distribute them with respect to each other or the sheet/board. I know there is the ‘Create Footprint Array’ but that’s just for a single footprint. When designing in Illustrator, it’s a nice quick process to place the leftmost object, then the right most object, (shift) select both of them and other objects and let the program center them along an axis (indicated by a further click on a reference object) or distributed between them equidistantly.
One last feature that would be useful is grouping. I’d love to group all the lines that make up say the board outline, or all the symbols or footprints that make up a section of a circuit and move them together leaving them grouped for further manipulation.
Nice ideas, can you develop / implement them? 
Related with “grouping” I saw someone is working on similar features, but not sure if its merged already on development branch.
This I would like. Having some control of nudge stepping would be nice too
Probably not to hard to write either, the interactions are with the rendering, DRC and the push and shove routing. Random dragging already affects all of these
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Yes, agreed. Incremental nudging with the cursor keys would be good.
Shows I’m new to the software. However, it is a little clunky. I’d prefer just a left click to select and then nudge
Yeah, you can use keys to nudge, or use Ctrl-M for relative move. Also, the array tool works on everything in Pcbnew, lines, parts, traces, everything, not just a single footprint.
I did implement two versions of grouping, the latest just yesterday, the one before that will not be added to version 5, dont know about after.
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Great stuff. Iook forward to using that.
I think this might get merged soon.
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Ctrl-M is often overkill, I just want to move a footprint L-R or U-D while not having to worry about nudging the mouse and moving on the other axis also. What is missing is rubber banding the existing connected tracks in GAL
Good news, there are two different patches (I believe one from Orson has been merged already) being discussed on the list to add this to OpenGL mode.
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Hi,
To add : -
- A simple feature to measure the distance between pads in PCB footprint editor.
- The ability to resize a graphical rectangle which is a polygon, rather than each side being separate from the polygon, where each side has to be modified - in the PCB footprint editor.
Thanks and Regards,
Shadders.
In answer to your first suggestion, you will find that a ‘Caliper’ has recently been added to the nightly build
The second request would be very desirable, as would lines that snapped back together without leaving a nanometer wide gap for the electrons to fall through.
2 Likes
Hi John,
Thanks for the update - i am using Fedora - so this feature will be a while in arriving.
I see you may be involved in physics - where as i am involved in basic electronics.
Regards,
Shadders.
Well there are no new nightly builds for fedora since 7 month ago. I don’t know if this is because of a lack of maintainers or because of some sort of problem. (the copr repo by mangelajo stopped even thought the last builds were ok. But jkastner never got a single build to succeed.)
I think i will switch to arch.
Excellent, it makes it easy to check connectors are in the right place
Hi, Do you know the status of this function nowaday? I don’t think it’s merged in the latest V5.
Could you tell me something about this function?
Many thanks.