Dynamic switching between IN and MM units

[Evan Shultz]

At https://lists.launchpad.net/kicad-developers/msg37201.html Seth posted a video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpw9dKxL2Ho&feature=youtu.be&a=) of an experienced Altium guy using KiCad 5.0. The video is generally painful and annoying to watch, but if I saw something that seemed worthy and I couldn't find it in the bugtracker already I thought I should add a new bug for it.

About 1:04 he switches between MM and IN mode, and then goes on a tirade because the units are not in MIL (or THOU). Because of the granularity of Imperial units sometimes IN is good (board/panel size) and sometimes MIL is best (track width, via drill size, etc.). He is right that it's visually cluttered so have so many zeros for small dimensions when everything is expressed in IN.

Since I'm a third party here, and I work in MM, I'll leave it to you fine folks to decide if there is anything to be done.

[Wayne Stambaugh (stambaughw)]

@Evan, I seem to remember a bug report about this already being filed but I could be wrong. There may have even been a patch to provide mils as a third unit option.

[Evan Shultz (evan-shultz)]

In the video, Dave was asking for dynamic updates of the dialog in addition to the units. I don't know that it's possible to click a toolbar icon when a blocking dialog is open so I'm not sure this is possible. But anyway, just letting you know this video Seth pointed out (from an Altium user) contained this request.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/kicad/+bug/1777597 and https://bugs.launchpad.net/kicad/+bug/1792748 are related to having mils as a unit (or related bugs to it).

[Seth Hillbrand (sethh)]

I'm pretty sure that Jeff has implemented most of this already.

The patch for mils as a display unit was here https://lists.launchpad.net/kicad-developers/msg30565.html

[KiCad Janitor (kicad-janitor)]

KiCad bug tracker has moved to Gitlab. Try searching for "lp:#1817127" on https://gitlab.com/kicad/code/kicad/-/issues