Things I found difficult or unintuitive as a newcomer

Improvement Ideas
1

Firstly, I’m not a complete newcomer, I have used EDA, gEDA/Gschem and Eagle in the past.
While I found my scratch experience of LibrePCB mostly intuitive, these are a few things which I have found difficult or non-intuitive.
Please treat this as positive feedback, I am persevering up the learning curve/

  1. If I decide I don’t want a particular {VALUE} text visible in the schematic, I can select and remove the text. That works as expected. Later I decide that removing it was a bad idea - how do I put it back ?

  2. I like to have the refdes (eg R67) numbers grouped logically, especialy when using repeating circuit sub-elements. Having used R1 and R2 once, and then having deleted them, the refdes-assigner keeps re-using R1 and R2 when I actually expect to be adding R67 and R68. I know that I could go in and manually change all the refdes numbers, but is there a way to either re-assign automatically, or even a way to unassign them (in a selected block) so that they all go back to R?

  3. When adding a new component to the schematic, I found that dropping the pin on top of the endpoint of an existing segment, does not automatically connect to that NET segment.
    I had expected that it would do this, or that it would prompt me “do you want to connect to N23”?
    It took me quite a while to discover that I have to drop the new pin “close but not touching”, draw a new segment to it, and then once connected I can move it back to where it should be.

  4. Having got a warning about “Less than 2 pins in N50” I found it difficult to locate the offending N50. It turned out to be a tiny disconnected segment (probably a mouse-fart), which was difficult to spot in a crowded schematic. Please add my vote for the “search for Net” improvement request.

2

Hi @kevind,

Thanks for your feedback, highly appreciated!

Right-click on the symbol, then “Reset All Texts”.

Unassigning is by design not supported – without a unique name it would not be clear what happens with such components in all the data exports, ERC, DRC etc.

An automatic re-assignment of the whole schematic should be relatively easy to implement, I opened an issue for that:

Yes this is simply not implemented yet. Sooner or later it will be there :wink:

Ack :+1: I think there are even already 2 issues open which would help in this situation.