pcbnew - keyboard commands stop working 'randomly' during routing

[Otto Mikkonen]

Sorry for the wild title.

When routing my PCBs in PCBNew, I'm experiencing loss of keyboard control frequently during routing.
This is a new thing that didn't exist till v5.1 as far as I can remember.

I don't know if there's a systematic way to make the problem arrive, but with me it usually happens when I'm routing traces (using X, V, Esc, W, N keys a lot), and all of a sudden none of the hotkeys respond anymore, and the only way for me to regain control is to use my mouse to select/deselect a tool I'm using (for example the tracing tool 'X').

Hope my jargon made sense!

- - VERSION INFORMATION - -

Application: kicad
Version: 5.1.2-f72e74a~84~ubuntu18.04.1, release build
Libraries:
    wxWidgets 3.0.4
    libcurl/7.58.0 OpenSSL/1.1.1 zlib/1.2.11 libidn2/2.0.4 libpsl/0.19.1 (+libidn2/2.0.4) nghttp2/1.30.0 librtmp/2.3
Platform: Linux 4.15.0-51-generic x86_64, 64 bit, Little endian, wxGTK
Build Info:
    wxWidgets: 3.0.4 (wchar_t,wx containers,compatible with 2.8) GTK+ 3.22
    Boost: 1.65.1
    OpenCASCADE Community Edition: 6.9.1
    Curl: 7.58.0
    Compiler: GCC 7.3.0 with C++ ABI 1011

Build settings:
    USE_WX_GRAPHICS_CONTEXT=OFF
    USE_WX_OVERLAY=ON
    KICAD_SCRIPTING=ON
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_MODULES=ON
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_PYTHON3=ON
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_WXPYTHON=ON
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_WXPYTHON_PHOENIX=ON
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_ACTION_MENU=ON
    BUILD_GITHUB_PLUGIN=ON
    KICAD_USE_OCE=ON
    KICAD_USE_OCC=OFF
    KICAD_SPICE=ON

[Michael Kavanagh (michaelkavanagh)]

I haven't come across this. If you find a reliable way to reproduce this please update this bug report.

[Jeff Young (jeyjey)]

This is a focus issue. The best way I've found to reproduce is here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/kicad/+bug/1810993.

[Jeff Young (jeyjey)]

(Not closing as duplicate because it's not clear that a single solution will work in both instances.)

[Otto Mikkonen (ottomaani138)]

Thank you the proceedings!
I tried to reproduce issue as described in https://bugs.launchpad.net/kicad/+bug/1810993, and it does result in similar weirdness indeed!

[Jeff Young (jeyjey)]

@Otto, the cause in the Zone Filling case is that the progress window messes up the keyboard focus. Do you remember if a dialog/window/status popup comes up when routing before the keyboard commands stop working? (Examples would include changing the layer for a via, or setting the router settings.)

[Otto Mikkonen (ottomaani138)]

@Jeff! Thanks for the follow-up! Hmm, not certain about that at this point unfortunately. But now that I know what to be on the look-out for, I'll try to be more attentive when I'm routing my next project and see if there's a pattern! Thanks for the pointer!

[Jeff Young (jeyjey)]

I had to redo the other fix, so it may have fixed this one too. I'm going to mark it Incomplete for now; if anyone reproduces it in a recent build, please set back to New.

[KiCad Janitor (kicad-janitor)]

KiCad bug tracker has moved to Gitlab. This report is now available here: https://gitlab.com/kicad/code/kicad/-/issues/1803