Skip to content

Align/Distribute doesn't work properly for text items in footprints

Description

You will often want to align footprint text (e.g. refdes) with the footprint body, excluding the text. This cannot currently be done.

Either the text doesn't move (in the case where you have the footprint selected) or it tries to move twice (where you have the text and a pad or other sub element selected)

I would expect that footprint text could be aligned with other footprint elements when they are both selected. Aligning footprint RefDes to the zero point of the footprint is also sufficiently common that I think we should have a context menu for when just a footprint field or text is selected that allows it to be aligned relative to the remaining footprint.

Peek_2025-06-29_11-12

Steps to reproduce

  1. Open Pic Programmer demo
  2. Select R1 and pad 1 of the footprint.
  3. Right click and choose align
  4. Note that the movement happens twice and undoing the movement gives an error

KiCad Version

Application: KiCad PCB Editor x86_64 on x86_64

Version: 9.0.2-301-gd3e5245606, debug build

Libraries:
	wxWidgets 3.2.8
	FreeType 2.13.3
	HarfBuzz 10.2.0
	FontConfig 2.15.0

Platform: Debian GNU/Linux 13 (trixie), 64 bit, Little endian, wxGTK, X11, xfce, x11
OpenGL: NVIDIA Corporation, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060/PCIe/SSE2, 4.6.0 NVIDIA 550.144.03

	wxWidgets: 3.2.8 (wchar_t,wx containers) GTK+ 3.24
	Boost: 1.83.0
	OCC: 7.8.1
	Curl: 8.14.1
	ngspice: 44.2
	Compiler: Clang 16.0.6 with C++ ABI 1002

Build settings:
	KICAD_IPC_API=ON
	KICAD_STDLIB_DEBUG=OFF
	KICAD_STDLIB_LIGHT_DEBUG=ON
	KICAD_SANITIZE_ADDRESS=OFF
	KICAD_SANITIZE_THREADS=OFF

Locale: 
	Lang: en_US
	Enc: UTF-8
	Num: 1,234.5
	Encoded кΩ丈: D0BACEA9E4B888 (sys), D0BACEA9E4B888 (utf8)