Comment 3 for bug 1745627

(Copied and continued from another report)

The current "lock pads" prevents accidental moving by grabbing and dragging with mouse. It has always been enough for me. However, selecting pad vs. footprint is always a problem. There could be a dedicated "Don't allow selecting individual pads" choice. Then trying to select a pad would select the whole footprint. That would prevent accidental changing of pad properties and moving it with mouse. It would also ease the disambiguation of item selection. But moving the footprint by dragging would still be possible when the footprint itself is not locked.

Logically locking the placement of the footprint on the one hand and selecting a pad and editing pad properties on the other are two different things. That's why it's a bit weird now that they are bundled together (in the development version).

Even more fine grained locking would be useful. For example dragging a reference instead of footprint is a recurring annoyment. But that would be more useful as a global choice instead of per footprint.

The most versatile option would be to have global choices for certain locked things which could be overriden in each footprint.

So there could be global choices:
- Lock pad location to prevent moving with mouse (but not selection or changing properties)
- Lock pad selection (logically locks also properties, selects the footprint instead)
- Lock footprint text selection (selects the footprint instead)

These could be overriden in each footprint, at least for pads, and there would be also "Lock footprint location".