Comment 11 for bug 1460460

The same wish here as well. @evan-schulz seems to define the problem nicely.

If the board is mating with a mechanical part, footprint placement with coordinates is a must.

I have just started using KiCAD, and I'm a long time Altium User. I'm loving the KiCAD experience so far. It's very elegantly designed, simple and easy to use. I believe I'll stay being a user for long time.

User defined origin selection is definitely very important. When the PCB needs to match with a mechanical design, you need to place a lot of footprints and vias with exact coordinates. Having the origin at the edge of the board (or at the center for circular boards) is a huge help. Most of the time, you want the origin of the mechanical design and the PCB design to be same, so that you can easily see placement coordinates for footprints and vias.

I thought "Grid Origin" button, at the right-hand side toolbar in Pcbnew, does user defined origin, but it doesn't seem to be doing anything. Maybe a button similar to this can define a user defined origin. Then all absolute coordinates will be relative to this new user defined origin.