Here we are again with a new batch of fixes for KiCad, again with a focus on usability and UX. Those are the kind of things that make a piece of software outstand among its competitors 🙂

Cyrillic text plotted as ??? when I plot dxf from eeschema (#1107767): sometimes we developers don’t realize about all the variety of use cases out there… and this is specially true when managing user text input. In this particular case, non-ASCII text was not correctly plotted to .dxf files. Our fix outputs non-ASCII text as lines because that’s the most compatible option. It’s waiting to be merged.

Launcher: create empty directory for new projects (#1108773): a good practice for KiCad projects is saving them in their own directory, because they are comprised by several different files (schematic, board, netlist, libraries…) and they must be kept together to backup or distribute the project. From now on, KiCad will check if you are creating a project in a new directory and will suggest to do it if that’s not the case.

Eeschema: title bar provides outdated information (#1110651): I was myself very confused the first times I used the application and realized that the title bar was not updated after saving the project for the first time or with a new name. That lack of feedback makes the user doubt about the reliability of the software, even when the save operations were working correctly. Fortunately the support was already there and the problem was fixed with a very simple patch.

Inconsistency between confirmation dialogs (#1116059): the different KiCad sub-apps showed different exit confirmation dialogs. It’s not actually a terrible problem because the user was still being warned about losing unsaved changes, but those different messages with different options (Yes/No, Save/Don’t save/Cancel) gave a somehow unprofessional look. Now the three-option exit confirmation dialog is used in all cases.

Eeschema: schematic files might be saved having a wrong file extension (#1122212): this was again a UI consistency problem. Some save dialogs forced the addition of the file extension even when not explicitly set, while others didn’t. At the same time, most open file dialogs expected the files to have the proper extensions and that could lead to strange situations like saving a file without extension and not being able to open it until manually renamed. Antía’s patch is ready and waiting to be integrated upstream.

PcbNew: Insert a footprint in the board, from the Library Browser, by double clicking on it (#1125047): we had already done the same improvement to the library browser in Eeschema. It was a simple change but it greatly improved the usability of that window. We’ve just realized that the same was happening in Pcbnew; although it was less noticeable because you usually import all the components from the netlist and don’t add them manually, Antía fixed it too and we expect to have it upstream soon.

Finally, I sent an amendment to my patches for bugs #1101718 and #1102381 because I wasn’t really satisfied with the solution and, as I suspected, there was a simpler way to do things.

I would like to thank the KiCad community members for being so welcoming in the last months. We are very proud here at Igalia for taking part in this process and help improving the state of the art of EDA open source software. And remember that we are ready and available if you need some consultancy work on KiCad.