copy layer colors between Pcbnew, Modedit and GerbView

[joost]

macos 10.12.16, rMBP
nightly:kicad-20180301-033129.ce1bd4c-c4osx

pcbnew and the footprint editor have their own color settings for layers and items. The pcbnew preference settings file confirms this with a series of color settings for each program.

Different colors for the board layout and foot print is confusing i.e. a change in one should be reflected by the other - this duplicate set up is annoying and time consuming. Instead, only a single color table should be referred to in the pcbnew preference file.

[Jon Evans (craftyjon)]

I tend to agree with this. @Wayne et. al. -- anyone disagree?

[Wayne Stambaugh (stambaughw)]

There may be use cases where a user would want to define different
colors in the board editor and in the footprint editor. Typically you
are dealing with more layer in the board editor than the footprint
editor so using the same colors may be less than optimal. I would
prefer that we make it optional to link the footprint editor layer
colors to the board editor layer colors but don't force that as the only
option. If you force it, you will most likely get another bug report
from a user who uses different color sets. I would prefer that we defer
this to v6 since it's a behavioral change.

On 3/6/2018 1:23 PM, Jon Evans wrote:
> I tend to agree with this. @Wayne et. al. -- anyone disagree?
>
> ** Changed in: kicad
> Assignee: (unassigned) => Jon Evans (craftyjon)
>

[jean-pierre charras (jp-charras)]

Moreover, because there are less copper layers in the fp editor than the board editor, transparency settings can differ between editors.

I am using same colors but not necessary same transparency between editors, because constraints are different: you cannot compare a footprint to a complex board.

Besides, I am not sure, but using different settings between editors was asked by an user.

[joost (boerhout)]

If there are valid reasons/use cases for the color sets to be different, at least make it easy/intuitive to copy colors from pcbnew to fpeditor (and vici versa) for identical layers. I guess I could make a little script and stick it in the plugin folder but I'd say such solution is not intuitive.

[Jon Evans (craftyjon)]

I will add an easy way to copy them back and forth as part of color theme support for V6

[KiCad Janitor (kicad-janitor)]

KiCad bug tracker has moved to Gitlab. This report is now available here: https://gitlab.com/kicad/code/kicad/-/issues/2114