Using Buses in Circuits with KiCad 7

Good video. With version 7, busses became a little more usable, in my opinion.

I had NO idea about "unfold bus." I wonder if there is a way to make it more usable though.

FYI, when you need to "repeat last command" for signals going to the right or up, like in your demo, I do a few tricks.

I use the "repeat last command" to generate all of the labels. Of course, this creates them in a vertical column from 1 to n+1. At this point, if you highlight them all, you can use R (rotate) to spin them 90 degrees for your left-to-right labels.

And to reverse the direction from n+1 to 1 vertically, just press Y (flip Y axis) to reverse the selection group

Good video. With version 7, busses became a little more usable, in my opinion.

I had NO idea about "unfold bus." I wonder if there is a way to make it more usable though.

FYI, when you need to "repeat last command" for signals going to the right or up, like in your demo, I do a few tricks.

I use the "repeat last command" to generate all of the labels. Of course, this creates them in a vertical column from 1 to n+1. At this point, if you highlight them all, you can use R (rotate) to spin them 90 degrees for your left-to-right labels.

And to reverse the direction from n+1 to 1 vertically, just press Y (flip Y axis) to reverse the selection group

Hi James,

I reckon if they wanted to improve it, this is a situation where EAGLE was quite nice, basically first selecting wire mode, and then any click on the bus will bring up the entire list, to allow selection, and then continue drawing the signal. 

Example with EAGLE:

With KiCad, I reckon what would be good would be if they could design it such that if W (wire) was pressed when the cursor is on a bus, then instead of just drawing a wire (as it does today), then it should just instantly show all the list, just like EAGLE. In fact this would be nice; pressing W and then all the possible signals listed in columns, or one large matrix, to let the user quickly choose, rather than the multiple-mouse-clicks that need to be done today. KiCad mockup of that:

Also today there's no flexibility in the direction that the signal will be pulled out. Whereas with EAGLE, it will bend in any direction because it follows the cursor:

If the 'W' key did what has been suggested above for wires off buses, then that EAGLE-style bending in any direction would be got for free, since that's existing W functionality (just not for a bus today).

Should we suggest this (or with further refinements if you can think of any) to the KiCad developers? Would that be via the KiCad.info site, or via a GitLab request of some sort?

Also there are a couple of bugs; one bug is already known but quite old, and one bug I raised yesterday.