Eeschema: Multiple-element highlighting & cross-probing

[Evan Shultz]

From https://bugs.launchpad.net/kicad/+bug/1837809

Window-selecting multiple nets doesn't highlight or cross-probe them (the segments turn blue and that's it). It is unclear to me why multi-select and single-select have different colors (blue vs magenta, respectively) if they're both seemingly doing highlighting. Multi-selecting any number of elements could highlight them all in Pcbnew and zoom to fit all those elements.

Application: Eeschema
Version: (5.1.0-1584-gc85d1fa00), 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

[Michael Kavanagh (michaelkavanagh)]

Seems like there is confusion between selection (blue shadow) and net-highlighting (magenta). I'm not sure how multiple net highlight would work, isn't the point to visually distinguish a specific net from the rest? Adding multiple highlighted nets might lead to more confusion.

[Evan Shultz (evan-shultz)]

There's no confusion in my mind, but maybe it's not clear to you what I'm suggesting. Let's try some situations I see that would be helped by this feature so that I elaborate, hopefully clearly, what I'm thinking and it's easier to tell me where I'm daft:
1. I may want to highlight multiple nets in just one area of a schematic (cross-probing them) to see where they are routed on a PCB. Do tracks go all over the place when they shouldn't?
2. Relatedly, I may want to select a symbols on the schematic to see the footprint placement on the board. Perhaps all parts should be placed nearby because of a high-impedance analog net but on the board the parts are spread out. Selecting from the schematic is easier here.
3. I may highlight some nets on one sheet and then navigate to other sheets and want to see wires on the same net in the other sheets. Because of the hierarchical blocks and sheets I may want to snoop around on the schematic in various places doing whatever. Being able to highlight a variety of nets and know the nets will stay highlighted is invaluable here.
4. I may want to find one net on the schematic and then continue adding more related nets to see them added to the highlighted group of nets on the board. For example, I may want to add in voltage nets one at a time (+12V, -12V, +5V, -5V, etc.) to check for loops in the routing of each net and then see the group of nets built up to see all of their tracks/zones. Or I may want to add in the members of a SPI bus one at a time to see that they're routed together and without changing layers for signal integrity. In both of these situations, the nets are usually close together on the schematic and that's where I usually find it easiest to locate them. And highlighting them in one group is messy and harder to pick out individual net details.

You can see there are both schematic-only and cross-probing benefits.

Being able to select multiple (additional) nets/symbols and persist highlighting, until I choose to dehighlight anything, is useful in all these situations. Think of it like highlighting in a word processor or with a marker by hand: I want to make a note of something for later use. Highlighting has an immediate use-case which KiCad supports now, but the use-case I'm describing above where I want to mark something for immediate and/or later use is not supported. (Note that net-specific coloring, which I think Jon is working on, which can fulfill the same needs but usually is only for (semi-)permanent applications so there's always value in quickly being able to highlight nets even if I can uniquely color them.)

[KiCad Janitor (kicad-janitor)]

KiCad bug tracker has moved to Gitlab. This report is now available here: https://gitlab.com/kicad/code/kicad/-/issues/2487