I’m moving from Eagle to KiCAD because I want to create 4 layer boards and can’t afford $60 per month for Fusion. Overall I’m impressed and I think KiCAD will serve me well. And it seems to be constantly improving. I do have a couple issues, I’ll put the second one in this thread.
I’m having trouble getting used to the process of dragging wires to clean them up after a component has been dragged. The component drag will create wire segments which are angled - not horizontal or vertical. That’s fine. But in Eagle, I’m used to being able to select a wire articulation point (corner), or a region of corners, and drag them to keep everything horizontal or vertical. Is there any way to do this in KiCAD? I hope the question makes sense.
For anyone else running into this, I figured it out. You select the region including the wire corners you want to drag, then choose “Drag Block” from the menu, or the default hotkey is Tab.
KiCad is being hampered a bit by a small number of developers and a lack of funding.
If you can manage to give it let’s say, 10% of the gross income of Altium and a few cans of full time developers, all those bumps would be smoothed out in a year or so.
That said. I like KiCad very much and think it’s one of the most wonderful open source projects I know but there are still a bunch of things missing that you would find “logical” such as dragging components with keeping tracks attached. Circular PCB tracks are also still problematic. All the basics are there however, and on top of that it also has some pretty neat functions such as the interactive router, pretty good databases with schematic symbols and Footprints, and editors to make your own parts for those odd schematic symbols and footprints that are not in KiCad itself.
As with any program with this sort of complexity and functions you need some time to get used to it and grow into it.
And if you don’t like it, you can apply for a full refund
(Except I think for voluntary donations, I don’t think there is a refund for those).
[Edit:]
Maybe “hampered” was a too strong a word. KiCad is doing all right indeed. It’s a pretty active Open Source project and there is much more development going on then in some other open source project I’d like to use. It’s also picking up market share, lots of companies are starting to notice, and development pace is also accelerating in the last few years.
A little offtopic note. Developers and users of every open source project feel and say the same about their own project. Heck, even commercial programs may have small number of developers and lack of funding. In reality KiCad has a pretty good situation in this respect.
