Allow searching in the ERC dialog

[Evan Shultz]

When the Electrical Rules Checker is run, violations may appear. If there are many violations, they will run off the bottom of the dialog and scrolling is required. Having violations "below the page" makes it hard to find them.

Since the schematic must be annotated before running ERC, searching by ref des is an obvious desire. As is searching by named nets. Searching by violation name might also be helpful. This helps the user to jump directly to ERC violations of interest while ignoring other errors without having to scroll through the dialog which is very text dense.

In my case, I often want to run ERC during schematic construction and before marking pins as NC. In this case, I may see loads of "not connected" ERC violations but what is important to me is violations that are NOT "not connected".

I propose adding a search box in the ERC dialog to allow finding violations of interest.

Generating the ERC report file and then searching the file checks all the boxes above, but it requires a separate program to be open which isn't as salient when in the flow of using KiCad as being able to search right from the relevant dialog.

Alternatively, suppressing certain kinds of violations (or only showing a limited set of them) would work as well but might be more involved to implement and/or less useful to all users. I think a search box is better.

[Maciej Suminski (orsonmmz)]

I am not sure if all ERC rules are settable, but you should definitely check out the 'Options' tab in the ERC dialog. It should make your life easier in the meantime.

[KiCad Janitor (kicad-janitor)]

KiCad bug tracker has moved to Gitlab. This report is now available here: https://gitlab.com/kicad/code/kicad/-/issues/2159