fritzing
Selecting overlapping parts
Problem
it is difficult and almost impossible to "click" the part you want if they are overlapping (best thing: IC on top and a SMD resistor on the bottom, try to catch the resistor! - no way) rectangular PCB
Proposed Solution
?
I think it would become much less of a problem if:
- "bring to front" and "send to back" actually worked, and
- selecting parts respected their order in those layers, and was consistent with highlighting (which it is not at the moment, often you will have one part highlighted on mouse over, and a different part selected when you click).
Then the solution to "I get the wrong part selected" is to simply select it and send it to back, repeating that operation until we select the part that we need. However, this wouldn't always work if we wanted to select multiple parts at once (holding down ctrl), with some of them possibly overlapping.
#52 could mitigate this in some cases Another way of fixing this would create a contetual menu that appears when there are several selection shapes overlapping and lets you decide which one you want (this is what Kicad and other CAD programs do). It could also be possible to select the part that has the minimum distance to one of its connectors. So, if you click to nearby of one part connectors, that part will be selected.
I find it that can often select the part I want by right-clicking on it and then dismissing the context menu, however, this selection is somehow different than selecting it with a left click — for instance, arrow keys will then scroll the view instead of moving the part. It would help to make those selections both behave the same.
Summary of suggested solutions
- Mouse wheel selection
- Consider exact part shapes to reduce overlap
- Fix mouse over highlighting, sometimes it is not in line with the part that gets selected
- Fix bring to front / sent to back, it is not reliable
- Add some heuristics (try to be smart): For example, when the mouse is near a connector, the user almost never wants to select the PCB board, but right now this is what often happens. To turn this into a rule of thumb: If multiple items are within the click-range, the smallest of the items should be selected.
Already existing solutions
- Bring to front / sent to back, but it sometimes does not work
- Pin a part to avoid selecting it and then accidentally moving it