I often use large footprints which overlap other footprints. Examples are "motherboards" as footprints when designing "shields" and OLED displays with pin header connections where components can be placed under the display.
It's clumsy that I can often select such a footprint by accident. Zooming in helps sometimes but not always. I would like to have an option (possibly file format change?) for such footprints which would prevent selecting them on the empty area inside the bounding box. They could be selected only by clicking directly on an item of the footprint (pad, graphic lines etc.). This should include selecting with box selection - only if an item of the footprint touches the box, the footprint would be selected.
When Edge.Cuts is enabled for footprints this would also make possible having outlines as footprints. Otherwise accidentally selecting those footprints will make using them impractical.
Application: Pcbnew
Version: (5.1.0-1008-g945eaceb9), release build
Libraries:
wxWidgets 3.0.4
libcurl/7.61.1 OpenSSL/1.1.1 (WinSSL) zlib/1.2.11 brotli/1.0.6 libidn2/2.0.5 libpsl/0.20.2 (+libidn2/2.0.5) nghttp2/1.34.0
Platform: Windows 8 (build 9200), 64-bit edition, 64 bit, Little endian, wxMSW
Build Info:
wxWidgets: 3.0.4 (wchar_t,wx containers,compatible with 2.8)
Boost: 1.68.0
OpenCASCADE Community Edition: 6.9.1
Curl: 7.61.1
Compiler: GCC 8.2.0 with C++ ABI 1013
Build settings:
KICAD_SCRIPTING=ON
KICAD_SCRIPTING_MODULES=ON
KICAD_SCRIPTING_PYTHON3=OFF
KICAD_SCRIPTING_WXPYTHON=ON
KICAD_SCRIPTING_WXPYTHON_PHOENIX=OFF
KICAD_SCRIPTING_ACTION_MENU=ON
BUILD_GITHUB_PLUGIN=ON
KICAD_USE_OCE=ON
KICAD_USE_OCC=OFF
KICAD_SPICE=ON
I'd like to hold off on addressing this until I finish updating the selection modes. I suspect that the problem this seeks to solve will become less of an issue