This change is a complete and utter backwards step. Why Kicad devs couldn’t give the user the ability to switch this on or off is a big mistake.
You are sending me back to v8 permanently.
For a board like this, I like to see what pads are my through-hole ones and what aren’t very easily when I am routing, especially when I have a mix of SMD, THP and single sided TH pads, now you are forcing me to switch layers for a second to see if it’s through hole or not.
It’s mentioned it’s for dense boards and the ability to see more clearly, well, not all boards are dense.
Very disappointed!
PS. I have searched for a thread couldn’t find one except an large RC thread on this matter.
I see benefits to both.
the pads being the same colour as the layer is actually more correct then gold but then people became accustomed to seeing gold because that’s what the pads will look like. Its a meta association.
So many years laying out PCB’s with yellow for all TH pads, from Wintek sMARTWORK, Wintek HiWireII, Cadsoft Eagle, Altium CircuitStudio and up to V8 Kicad…only to get thrown onto the street by V9.
Ian.
What operating system and screen resolution + scaling do you use?
Your screenshots are missing the gold rings for the hole walls, which together with the black holes indicate a PTH pad.
It also looks like you have defined the color for via holes to be black in your custom color theme. In the default KiCad theme, via holes are gold (with white hole walls) to distinguish them from PTH pads.
If you’d like thicker walls, you can set this yourself using the kicad_advanced file. The flag is:
HoleWallPaintingMultiplier=XX
Where XX should be a number. It defaults to 1.5 where it multiples the physical size of the plating wall (generally 20um). You might set this to 5.0 or higher to get thicker walls drawn in your view
Looks like nobody mentioned the actual reason for this change in this thread yet. The reason this was done is because of the implementation of real pad stacks, in which pads can have different sizes or shapes in different layers. If all the copper of a THT pad would be yellow, you can’t see the different pads.
Those are also big words. THT pads still have a black hole in the center (bit annoying that it obscures grid dots and other things, but that’s another topic). KiCad also goes through a lot of development, and these colors may change again. I don’t like the idea of making this configurable. It would be just another setting to twiddle with and distract from more important things. but more importantly, it makes it harder to diagnose problems from screenshots on this forum. I have not used V9 yet, but I guess I could get used to this quite easily. Showing the copper barrel as a yellow ring as in craftyjons screenshot looks nice though. Showing all the information of a pad stack with differently sized pads on different layers would be difficult. I don’t have an solution to that at the moment. If you (or others) have some constructive ideas of how this could be done, I’d like to read them. Maybe such an idea would be worth to make a feature request, and actually get implemented in KiCad at some future time.
I am actually quite fuming about this change the more I think about it. Kicad devs have changed something quite fundemental for no apparent reason whatsoever apart from thinking about those with complex SMD designs and who don’t care much for THP.
I consider myself a fairly run of the mill user, and if it’s hurting me then it’s hurting others. The change is so drastic to my long and consistent workflow that it’s doing nothing but driving me away from Kicad.
I’ve committed some of my hard earned money, several times, to the Kicad project…and to be kicked down like this is absolutely diabolical.
It’s time to look for a Windows registry hack to put things back as they were, stay with Kicad V8, or jump ship.
Seth already told you how to “hack” the size of the hole wall by setting a different value in advanced config. We’ll also make some tweaks so that the hole walls are a bit more pronounced and never disappear.
As for the rest of your post, well, stick with KiCad or not, V8 or V9, but maybe try assuming better of the people around you.
Don’t know if this helps Ian but I went to PCB editor preferences switched (in the colours bit ) to USER(footprints) instead of Classic and I changed the wall colour from a dull yellow to bright yellow and the walls show up well (better) and the via’s are more pronounced. Not sure if I am missing something or you’ve been down this route But it was just a thought Don’t like to think of my ‘fav fixer of fings’ being upset
Umm? You mentioned a problem to us. Within a couple hours, you have multiple people suggesting work around solutions for your immediate use. On a weekend. AND as Jon mentioned, we went ahead and adjusted code to potentially help even more so that you won’t need a workaround in 9.0.1.
I see people bending over backward to help you. If you’d like to just rant at people, then please go elsewhere. If you’d like to cooperate in a solution that makes the community better, then we’d love to have you but maybe without the slights directed at us
I stopped reading your post right there. I just explained why it was done.
You can fume all you like, but I’ll also set this thread to “muted” so I won’t be bothered with your fuming anymore.
It’s always astonishing to me how invested some people get in a particular UI feature. Change an icon and suddenly the entire program is completely unusable…
As for the through-hole color - well, my last PCB layout program showed all copper on a layer in the same color. I never had any problem with that, and moving to KiCad (when it had yellow for THT) didn’t affect my ability to use it one way or the other. After all, at through-hole has a, you know, hole in the middle. Kind of gives away it function.
I apologise for my ‘rant’…it was out of order. The devs don’t deserve being treated that way.
I guess it just hit me pretty hard being invested in a great piece of software for so long…and I became blind to the posted workarounds.
Going forward, I believe a configurable option and even having it default to the new ability to show the pad stack with differently sized pads on different layers would be more than acceptable.
If not, I’ll look at the current workarounds.
I’m mainly a hardware guy but have written a few C++/VB embedded/Windows apps in my day and I guess I am used to my way of looking at things. I’m an old fart relatively speaking!
PS. The Appearance & Properties panels in PCB editor don’t stick on restarting V9.0
I checked pcbnew.json and show_layer_manager and show_properties both jump back to false…I’m sure somebody will pick this up.
Intuitively I would interpret the yellow part to be copper exposed, that is, opening in the solder mask.
Now it is not, but instead an arbitrary setting.
Probably for hte same reasons all the other settings are hidden behind that file. Its obscure enough that people won’t easily enable it while the features are finalised. ODB++ was hidden behind this as well prior to being promoted to a UI setting
Don’t like to think of my ‘fav fixer of fings’ being upset 
