Make it more obvious that you can type units into many textCtrls

[Chris Pavlina]

Many text fields in pcbnew allow the user to type a unit - for example [1]. The interface does nothing to make this clear, however. We should come up with a way to make clear to the user that the unit is available for editing.

Proposal: instead of having the unit outside the field, put it *in* the unit, and autoselect just the number when the dialog is opened. If the user accidentally deletes the unit from the field, default to the currently selected unit as we already do.

Reference: https://bugs.launchpad.net/kicad/+bug/1660150

[1] https://misc.c4757p.com/unit-in-field.png

[Adam (arudzins)]

The ability to type in the unit is truly a great thing.

To make it even more splendid, I suggest to show a conversion to alternative units when hovering the mouse over a field with value. This could be in the form:

0,01 in = 0,254 mm

The displayed values could be rounded to a reasonable number of digits after dot/comma, like 3 or 4.

This could be done in general for any field with a value.

[Adam (arudzins)]

And another thing: the dialog [1] allows to quickly change size to "non-standard"
and conveniently resets the values to default (defined in Design Rules) after saving the design.
(although I'm not sure if this was intended)

However, if you frequently cycle between a few widths, typing them all the time becomes inconvenient (especially that you type in inches, not mills). I suggest to expand this particular dialog by allowing to have a few presets there. These could be volatile and perish when pcbnew is closed.

The number of presets does not need to be high, perhaps 3 would be enough. The dialog could have for each preset: a button with eg. an arrow for storing current values and a button to recover these values. The currently stored values could be presented on the button or somewhere near. I think that it would be more convenient if clicking a preset button closed the dialog and put the new values immediately in action.

The values defined in Design Rules could be one of these presets (especially if the restore-on-save functionality was not intended).

[Jeff Young (jeyjey)]

5.1 puts the units in all the grid controls, which is probably a reasonable compromise.