Many times after clicking on overlapping items it would be useful to select all instead of just one item from the disambiguation popup menu. This happens especially in pcbnew, but might also be useful in eeschema. Any thoughts on adding “select all” to that menu? Perhaps the first item could be changed from the “prompt” to a “select all” option?
Thoughts?
I would rather add a submenu at the bottom of the list. Sometimes items under the cursor have been excluded (for example zones); it might be good to have them all there + “select all”.
Please file feature requests on GitLab so they don’t get lost!
In general I also have some thoughts about improving the disambiguation system, but the right forum for that is on GitLab so the development team (who don’t all hang out here) can take part
This “Feature Request Chat” category exists for chatting about possible feature request with other users before they are reported to the database. It may enhance chances of getting well thought out reports rather than half baked (or for example wishes for features which already exist).
Ah, that makes sense.
Anyway here are my thoughts on the matter:
I don’t have too much of an opinion on adding options to the popup menu. If people find that helpful, I’m all for it. But, I personally want to add a different way of doing disambiguation (selectable by option, because of course some people will prefer the current system).
The basic idea is, no more popup menus for selection.
Instead, a list of selection candidates is created every time a selection event happens. Then, the most likely candidate is immediately selected.
There are then two or three hotkeys related to selection candidates:
Next Selection Candidate cycles down through the list. I would personally map this to <TAB>.
Previous Selection Candidate lets you go backwards. I might leave this unmapped, or map to <SHIFT+TAB>
Select All Candidates would do the action requested by @HiGreg.
My reasoning for this is that I use my right hand on the mouse and left hand on the keyboard as often as possible, and I hate modal things (dialogs or context menus) that get in the way of working unnecessarily.
Since we will have a better selection filtering system before too long, it will be much easier to reduce the set of selection candidates by just turning off selection of item types you don’t care about. This should reduce the opportunities for selecting the wrong thing. For example, if you are doing placement, you might never want to select a pad, only a whole footprint. If you are doing routing, maybe it’s the other way around.
Interesting. Is there now a report or something in gitlab to discuss this further? I surely have comments.
I don’t think one exists yet. I just have it in my private notes (unfortunately I have more feature ideas than I have had time to create issues for… I should try to get through my backlog)
I haven’t filed a request on github yet, I was hoping to come to a consensus about the feature request. We can certainly link back to this thread when I or someone else submits to github.
Many programs will cycle through the selection with subsequent clicks on the same spot. However, I’m not sure how/if that will work in combination with the popup.
I think your original request sounds fine.
@eelik’s proposal to include more items is a bit more tricky with the current way the system works (which tries to make lots of guesses based on context) but is possible.
I think using subsequent clicks instead of a hotkey seems more risky to me – what if you accidentally move to a different (nearby) spot which results in collecting a slightly different list of candidates? It also feels strange from a UX point of view, as double-clicking items has an action, so if you want to quickly cycle through, you have to time it carefully to avoid triggering a double-click.
Basic users can’t change tags, I can as a member of the Bug Squad.
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