Message-ID: <5150341D.2050406@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 25 Mar 2013 11:25:17 +0000
From: Iain Paton <selsinork AT gmail DOT com>
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To: geda-user AT delorie DOT com
Subject: [geda-user] pcb layers & shortcuts
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Reply-To: geda-user AT delorie DOT com

I've used gschem& pcb on and off for many years, but recently my usage has spiked considerably and a couple of problems have started to become quite annoying.
Google and the faq aren't helping me, 

First is that muscle memory has me using Alt-S to change hole sizes, but this now brings up a menu instead of changing the size. Doing what Alt-S used to do is now an akward manual excercise through a two level deep menu. Is there a better way, or a way to get the old behaviour back ?

Second is that I rarely, if ever, want an 8 layer board. Editing the layers through File/Preferences is fine, but has to be done for every board. I found $HOME/.pcb/preferences which contains layer and group definitions, but if I edit these then they're ignored and over-written with the default 8 layer setup every time I restart pcb, similarly using --groups 1,c:2,s on the command line is ignored. Using the groups string in pcbrc also appears to be ignored.

Somewhere in my attempts to solve this I've ended up with File/Preferences showing 8 layers, but drawing lines on a blank pcb nothing shows up at all - saving the file and opening it in an editor shows that it has a line Groups("") and I now have to manually edit the file and add the correct groups before re-opening it in pcb, trying to edit the layers in File/Preferences has no effect in the saved file.

I can't be the only one who wants their own layer configuration and would like it to stick as a default. So how do I do it ?  Config file I've missed, or do I just have to find the place it's defined in the source change it and recompile ?