Support customization of board selection drop-down

[RussellAult]

Describe the request

It would be great if there was a way to populate the drop-down with frequently-used boards. I could see this being populated manually (either as part of preferences or as a "favourite" button in the board selection window), automatically (e.g. the last five boards used appear in the drop-down), or some combination of the two.

Describe the current behavior

When editing sketches "offline" (or, as I understand it, when using a bootloader-less chip and a programmer) the only thing that appears in the board selection drop-down is "Select Other Board & Port". Even if I only ever used a couple of boards, I always have to go in and search for them (which makes arduino/arduino-pro-ide#369 a lot more annoying).

Arduino IDE version

Original report

Arduino Pro IDE 0.1.3

Last verified with

2f2b19f

Operating system

All

Operating system version

Any

Additional context

Additional requests

• https://forum.arduino.cc/t/2-3-2-can-we-save-some-presets-in-the-selection-dropdown-box/1301996

Related

• Add an option to favorite some boards #1953
• add a frequent flyer list to the boards menu #330
• Implement "Recently Used Boards" Menu Arduino#10816
• Add per-session recently used boards list Arduino#8607
• Disabling unused boards in the IDE  #2339

Issue checklist

• I searched for previous requests in the issue tracker
• I verified the feature was still missing when using the latest nightly build
• My request contains all necessary details

[ubidefeo]

@RussellAult
this looks like an interesting feature.
Let me throw it at our UX team and see what they think 👍

[per1234]

Now that the Tools > Board menu has been added, it might be worth studying what has already been done in this space for the classic Arduino IDE (and requested at #330):

• Implement "Recently Used Boards" Menu Arduino#10816
• Add per-session recently used boards list Arduino#8607

[ubidefeo]

@per1234
I really like the idea of having recently used boards.
Sometimes you just want to make sure you can compile for something you're developing on as a target without having it attached