Comment 16 for bug 593962

My TLDR is:

When starting to design a board, all footprints are spread chaotically, and the
ratsnest shows me which footprint is related to which other.

The reason to hide ratsnests is: the power nets are everywhere, and I keep
placing the wrong footprints next to unrelated "rooms". Super annoying!

My main point is: I want to hide those ratsnests that are ubiquitous to not
confuse the "this belongs over here" aspect of the ratsnest.

Coloring is of minimal importance. The killer feature is hiding specific
ratsnests. I would be totally fine without coloring, just hiding.

The other aspect is to see what netclass a trace is going to be. Not so
important to me personally, but certainly a separate great feature that
coloring would be useful for.

On Sat, Nov 03, 2018 at 11:42:40PM -0000, hauptmech wrote:
> There may be other ways to reduce the visual complexity. Not drawing the
> ratsnest line as a full line, but instead having short directional
> pointers at each node, might be an approach.

Nah, I want to immediately see a footprint's direct neighbors. Full lines from
start to end. Vague directions don't cut it.

A different very complex solution for me would be that the initial placement of
footprints already takes care of placing immediate neighbors close to each
other, so that I only implement the exact nudging, rotation and routing.

A good and simple solution could also be: draw ratsnest lines less bright, the
more pads they contain. That could be a simple global enable/disable button.
What do you think?

> Not all boards are equal and forcing complex setup on a simple board
> would be unhelpful.

All boards have power nets, i.e. GND and one or more power supply nets that
totally clutter the initial footpring placing process. I am sure that all users
benefit from hiding those power nets during first footprint placement.

(Also, none of this is forcing anything. If you don't use it, everything is as
it always was...)

> Like net highlighting or high-contrast mode or layer color, ratsnest
> complexity reduction should be done in the main interface rather than
> buried in a setup dialog.

What is the "main interface"?

> Netclasses are a feature not everyone uses. They are groups of nets and
> being able to select a netclass instead of doing multiple selections of
> nets is a definate win, but nets are the fundamental object of interest
> here.

We could invent a concept of a "Ratsnest class", and allow applying their
visibility to either netclasses or individual nets? Hmm, not simple enough for
my taste.

Thanks for discussing this! I think it is one of the most obvious things that
pcbnew should be able to do, useful for everyone placing more than five
components.

I'm now at:

1: adjust ratsnest brightness by amount of pads: the more footprints a net
touches, the less bright it should show. A single on/off option in the View
menu is pretty much all config that is needed. No need to even save in file.

2: allow setting specific ratsnest colors by netclass. That needs a config
dialog and saving to file.

Both are orthogonal separate features.

~N