I’ve noticed that every time I open a project/pcbfile/schfile, or even a component library in KiCad, it creates a new window. When I work on several projects and schematics at the same time, my Windows desktop becomes cluttered with an excessive number of windows. It’s cumbersome and error-prone to switch between them, as I need to carefully identify which schematic belongs to which project. This not only wastes valuable time but also overcomplicates the taskbar.
Why not integrate everything into a single window, allowing multiple projects to be open simultaneously, or at least have all related files of one project in a shared window? This approach could greatly streamline the workflow.
Are there any plans to incorporate such improvements in future versions of KiCad?
This approach could greatly streamline the workflow.
I’m exactly 180° contrary to your opinion: I’m very happy with the current concept: one window per editor. This allows to easily switch between windows with the standard Alt+Tab task-switching hotkey.
With a integrated GUI (like altium for instance) I was always slower and needed more mouse-movement. Admittedly I have only worked 3 years with Altium CS (with integrated MDI GUI), maybe that was not enough to inherit and value the advantages of that concept.
Me too.
“MDI” brings up nightmares from the '90-ies when most programs were forced to live in a single rectangle.
Consider these:
Multi monitor setups, where monitors have different sizes or resolutions.
I quite often want to have different schematics next to each other for reference / comparisons. One of them is often a much smaller area because I am only interested in a small portion of that schematic.
Linux has a very nice “multi desktop” feature. It works with a few icons in the “taskbar” that switch all visible programs on your desktop, with another set of programs. This can easily be used to separate multiple simultaneously open KiCad projects (and open documentation, etc) from each other. I don’t know if windows has something similar.
The plan would be to work like any modern web browser: you can have multiple documents per window, but you can also tear out documents into multiple windows.
The way tabs work in browsers works quite nice for browsers:
Pull it out of the tab bar and it lives on itself.
Push it into another existing tab bar and it docks again.
… are quite nice for a web browser. I don’t know if I would make (much) use of it if something similar gets implemented in KiCad, but I have no objections either. If such a thing gets implemented, I would prefer a setting in the preferences for the default behavior. I.e, whether a new editing canvas (symbol & footprint editors, others?) gets opened in either a tab or a window.
Would this mean that Menu’s and toolbars change, depending on which of the GUI canvas has focus? And what if you attempt to dock a window from one KiCad project into an instance for another KiCad project? I guess that such things will get smoothed out and refined over time.
A precondition of even starting on such work would be that KiCad needs to handle having multiple projects open at once. I don’t see this happening anytime soon; there are more urgent issues to address.
I understand the scenario you mentioned, but what I would like to suggest is adding an option (preference) that allows me to switch between a single window mode and multiple window mode. Similar to Altium software, which also supports multiple windows.
My suggestion is to add an option that allows users to choose between a single-window or multiple-window mode based on personal preferences and habits. However, it seems that the most efficient way to address this issue for now would be for me to invest in additional monitors.