Selecting, dragging and editing
Updated v2.4.4At a glance
- Picking follows the ink, not a bounding box — a GND flag claims the three bars and the word, nothing more
- Dragging a part takes its wires with it: attached ends follow the pins, the rest stretch
- Marquee left-to-right selects what's fully enclosed, right-to-left grabs anything it touches
- Selection recolors the symbol itself — no box, no halo, nothing drawn over your schematic
- Double-click any text on the sheet to retype it in place: values, references, net labels, notes
- Copy, paste and duplicate carry connectivity, because they carry coordinates — a pasted block reconnects itself
- Paste arms a ghost you can rotate and mirror before committing, so a merge into existing geometry is visible first
- The selection filter makes a kind unpickable, so a click falls straight through it to what's behind
Picking follows the ink
Nothing on the sheet is picked by a bounding box. A symbol's hit shape is built from the geometry it actually draws — outlines, pin leads, glyph bars, text rectangles — so a resistor is its body and its leads, and a GND flag is three short bars and a word. Hitting any part of it selects the whole thing, so symbols still behave as single objects; they just stop claiming the air around themselves.
Closed shapes count as filled for picking, because clicking the middle of a resistor's body plainly means the resistor, and an outline-only target would be a one-pixel line.
Wires are tested above symbol bodies. A wire is a one-pixel line and a symbol is a large shape, so wherever they overlap the wire is what you meant. The grab margin is constant in screen pixels at every zoom — the closer you look at something, the easier it should get to hit, not harder.
Hovering tints whatever is under the cursor, and stays live even while a drawing tool is armed — while you're routing a wire the next gesture is "connect to that", and the tint is what tells you which entity owns the point the snap ring is showing.
Selection recolors the symbol itself. No box, no halo, nothing drawn on top of your drawing.
Marquee
Left-drag on empty sheet draws a marquee, with the same semantics as the rest of JetCad3: left-to-right is a window (blue — only what is fully enclosed), right-to-left is crossing (green — anything the box touches). Shift adds to the selection.
Dragging
Press on a part — selected or not — and drag. It moves on the snap grid, and its wires come with it: every wire end sitting on one of that part's pins travels with the drag, so a part you nudge stays wired. Drag a multi-part selection and wires wholly inside it move rigidly while wires leaving it stretch by their endpoint.
Net labels, power symbols, junctions and text notes drag the same way. Reference and value labels drag as offsets from their own part, on a 50-mil grid, so you can open up a dense corner without moving anything electrical.
The whole gesture is one undo step. Escape mid-drag puts everything back exactly and commits nothing.
Editing text in place
Double-click any text on the sheet and it becomes an input right where it sits, in the same font at the same size — the value, the reference designator, a net label, a power symbol's net, a text note. Enter commits, Escape cancels. Committing a label re-derives the netlist, a reference is checked for uniqueness across the board, and a value re-resolves its vendor match.
Copy, paste and duplicate
Ctrl/Cmd+C, Ctrl/Cmd+V, Ctrl/Cmd+D.
A pasted block reconnects itself. Wires hold no connection references at all — every net is re-derived from where things sit — so translating a block reconstructs the identical topology on the other end with nothing to rebuild. Rotate a copied block and the wires and the symbols turn together, so no pin ever comes off the wire attached to it.
What paste actually has to work at is references, not geometry:
- Designators are always reallocated. A copied multi-unit part keeps its gates under one new package rather than scattering them.
- No-connect flags come along with their part, and are dropped if it didn't.
- Simulation probes never travel — they aren't sheet entities.
Paste arms a ghost rather than dropping immediately. R rotates, M mirrors, Escape cancels,
a click commits. That is deliberate: a pasted wire end landing on existing geometry connects to it
under the T-rule, silently merging two nets, and seeing the block under the cursor first is what
makes that visible. The whole paste is one undo entry.
Duplicate skips the ghost — one grid offset, committed straight away — and deliberately doesn't disturb your clipboard.
Pasting into a different document is refused with a reason, because the library wouldn't come with it.
The selection filter
The Filter group in the bottom bar controls which kinds can be picked: parts, wires, labels, power symbols, text, junctions.
A filtered-out kind is not merely unselectable — it is not there as far as the cursor is concerned. The marquee skips it, hover never lights it, and a click passes straight through it to whatever is behind. That is the point: since wires are tested above symbol bodies, unchecking Wires is how you reach the part beneath a rail.
Changing the filter prunes the current selection to match, so you can never end up with something selected, highlighted, and un-deletable. And a group with anything switched off renders tinted with a tooltip naming what is off — which is why a filter is safe to leave set between sessions.