I don’t know if or how sharp angles actually affect a PCB in a negative way. But I’d like that pcbnew would automatically prevent from ever getting a sharp corner. Being in a pad or in a track.
These are easy to miss sometimes.
Is there some setting for this behaviour?
And can I let the DRC find sharp corners?
Any effects are almost certainly negligible. In theory there is a reflection on the “open end” of the pad, but you would need to have extremely steep flanks on your signals with frequency content into many GHz for this to have an effect.
Some people are concerned about “acid traps” in sharp corners, but that is also a thing of day’s long gone by. If any PCB manufacturer has a problem concerning acid traps, then it’s high time to switch to another PCB manufacturer that does have some decent process control. Maybe it’s still an isue with DIY etching, but it can’t be too difficult to wash the PCB in a fluid that neutralizes any remaining acid after etching.
So what remains is mostly a visual thing. The PCB you are looking at on your monitor is probably magnified 50x or more and the features are very small. But despide all that, I also have a strong tendency to “clean up” such corners and “make them look nice”. It is nearly impossible to unlearn such a habit.
In your second screen shot you also mention the “sharp corner”, but what is a little bit more of a concern is the extra horizontal track segment. I tend to remove such small track segments, partly for visual reasons, and partly because the interactive router works better without such small vectors. KiCad’s interactive router is also constantly being tweaked and improved. It works a lot better now in a lot of details compared with one or two years ago.
KiCad also has PCB Editor / Tools / Cleanup Tracks and Vias. It can save you some time for cleanup. I also assume each vector takes some processing time, and a lot of very small vectors need more processing time (zoom, DRC, routing calculations) then a few long tracks. It would be nice if KiCad had functions to remove such short track segments by extending or moving the longer segments a bit, but KiCad does not have that (yet). I am also not aware of a function to highlight short track segments so you can clean them up manually. It is possible there are already feature requests for similar functions on gitlab but I have not checked. There are currently almost 1300 open issues on gitlab for KiCad.
