Summary
The PCB viewer's layer: dropdown toggles which copper layer is in the foreground (the others fade). On a densely populated 2-layer board with components on both sides, that doesn't help much when you want to hide all top-side or all bottom-side components — you still see both populations stacked on the canvas.
It would be useful to have two checkboxes in the existing View ▼ dropdown:
- Show Top Components (default on)
- Show Bottom Components (default on)
…that hide every SMT component on the corresponding side, while leaving through-hole components (any pcb_component that owns at least one pcb_plated_hole) visible regardless. Through-hole connectors / test points exist on both sides of the board and don't sensibly belong to either toggle.
Use cases I hit while building a 2-layer board
- "Show me only the bottom side so I can compare against the bottom-layer datasheet drawing."
- "How crowded is each side? Toggle one off, see the other in isolation."
- "Hide the bottom-side decoupling caps that are visually crowding the top-side chip during placement work."
- "Eyeball whether through-holes are correctly excluded from a one-sided assembly preview."
These are the same kinds of tasks people use the per-side stack-up toggles in KiCad / Altium for.
Out of scope
- The existing
layer: dropdown (which highlights the active layer and fades the others) stays unchanged. These toggles are about visibility, not foreground/background.
- Traces, copper pours, board outline, vias, and edge cuts always render — they're not "components."
- The toggles should persist across reloads via
localStorage, like the existing view-menu toggles.
Proposed UI
Two new CheckboxMenuItem rows under "Show Silkscreen" in the View dropdown — same component, same styling.
I have a working implementation and PR up: #TBD.
Summary
The PCB viewer's
layer:dropdown toggles which copper layer is in the foreground (the others fade). On a densely populated 2-layer board with components on both sides, that doesn't help much when you want to hide all top-side or all bottom-side components — you still see both populations stacked on the canvas.It would be useful to have two checkboxes in the existing View ▼ dropdown:
…that hide every SMT component on the corresponding side, while leaving through-hole components (any
pcb_componentthat owns at least onepcb_plated_hole) visible regardless. Through-hole connectors / test points exist on both sides of the board and don't sensibly belong to either toggle.Use cases I hit while building a 2-layer board
These are the same kinds of tasks people use the per-side stack-up toggles in KiCad / Altium for.
Out of scope
layer:dropdown (which highlights the active layer and fades the others) stays unchanged. These toggles are about visibility, not foreground/background.localStorage, like the existing view-menu toggles.Proposed UI
Two new
CheckboxMenuItemrows under "Show Silkscreen" in the View dropdown — same component, same styling.I have a working implementation and PR up: #TBD.