Comment 10 for bug 816739

Yeah, I just started doing electronics and am pretty disappointed with the OSS offerings, given that is isn't exactly a terribly complicated problem, like CAD or video editing... Five minutes of using kicad tells me that either the authors never used the software, or are crazy masochists!

Mouse warping was the first craziness, but let's look at some other bugs that I found. Note that this was literally within 5 minutes of using the program. How these haven't been noticed and fixed is beyond me:

1. Mouse warping in many places.
2. There are two mouse cursors - cross and pencil. Just seems weird; hide the pencil.
3. I got to "Insert Component" fine, but then what do you do? Seems not very discoverable, I guess I'll click "Search by keyword." Needless to say this did not do what I expect. Why don't you should the component library when you click "Insert component"?
4. Ok, so I found the Library Browser, but once you've found part what do you do? There's no ok button. Double clicking does nothing. In the end I have to hover all the toolbar buttons. Not exactly friendly.
5. Moving the splitters breaks the UI!
6. Ok now I want to move a component. I click and drag it, but that creates a rubber band... and moves is... and the rubber band? Wtf is going on?
7. Ok so now I want to delete the component. I try to select it by dragging a box around it, or clicking it. Neither seems to work. I right click it, and it says the delete shortcut is DEL, but how the hell do I select it so I can press that?! Eventually I found out you hover over it and then press del.

And so on. I still haven't found out how to export a netlist (or whatever it is I need to do to get to the PCB stage).

Stop messing with the standard UI conventions that work very well and have been around for decades! For an example of how it *should* be done, see Dia, or better, IPE. In fact I think IPE could be turned into a good schematic/PCB editor without too much effort. Perhaps less effort than would be needed to make kicad sane.

For what it's worth, Eagle also has a retarded UI. I haven't tried geda yet but I have low hopes.

/rant.

PS: I hope this is more motivational than demoralising; prove me wrong (by fixing stuff)!