I am wondering about your thoughts on this topic. Usually when I work on electronic projects, I try to make things as simple as possible, so designing a PCB with SMT stuff and PCB-mounted components (switches, pots etc.) is the easiest since you don’t need to fiddle with wires and pins etc.
However, in modular I tend to like the freedom to layout my front panel however I like, each time I assemble a new module, so I prefer non-PCB-mount components. Jacks, pots, switches etc. are connected with wires to the board. Another reason is that I am much more flexible when some parts are not available (since Covid it got much worse as we all know) since obviously I don’t need to match a specific height, dimension and pin layout on the PCB, just find a place on the panel and connect them.
Long story short, I am wondering what your approach is when you do the PCB layout in e.g. KiCAD?
Quite often, audio jacks are grounded and only the tip is connected and ince I use aluminium panels, the ground connection is there by design and I only need a single wire to connect the signal to the PCB. Of course, other times I need two or more.
The way one can deal with this in KiCAD is for example assigning a JST connector (with the correct number of pins) to the component
This usually works fine but in the screenshot above, there is a DPDT switch with 6 pins and I tried to assign a JST XH connector with 6 pins and unfortunately the unit is shown in two pieces in the footprint assigner, but in theory this should works 
Btw. two out of the six pins are not connected at all so in principle one could hack around and use a 4 pin JST XH. I have not figured out how to do it correctly in KiCAD, without ERC warnings and other issues (the alternate pin assignment feature seems buggy or I don’t understand how to deal with them).
Another possibility is to hide the component in the PCB editor by prefixing its name with #. By doing this, the component is still there in the schematic editor but not present in the net list, so you will not see it in the PCB editor either. Of course, the connections are still needed, so one needs to add an extra component (connector) to the schematic and then use net labels to hook it up.
I don’t like the second solution since the layout is mixed into the schematics, which is kind of an anti-pattern, but sometimes it’s even necessary e.g. if you want to have daughter boards or connect multiple parts with a single connector.
I was wondering what yor thoughts are about this. So again, what’s your approach when designing a PCB which is connected to multiple panel mount components?
