Is there a way to grab a footprint at a specific position? G always moves the cursor to the center of what’s under it, but I’d like to be able to grab a footprint anywhere and move it using that point (like an “offset grab”). It’d be useful for pushing parts up against each other, as I can grab the edge of the part and use the arrow keys to move it up against another part whilst zoomed in. Currently this moves the center of the part to where my cursor is (as the center is off-screen when zoomed in), which makes it unusable - I just use “Move Exactly” at the moment but it’s not ideal.
There is an action for that: “Move with Reference”:
- Right click the footprint
- Positioning Tools → Move with Reference
- Choose the point you want to grab the footprint by (doesn’t actually have to be on the footprint)
- Move the footprint
If you need to position a specific point relatively to something else, rather than right on top of it, then “Position Interactively” may be what you actually want.
You can bind a hotkey to either of them.
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Move with Reference is the one! Thank you! I’ll definitely be binding that to a key.
No, not true. footprints are grabbed by either the anchor point of the footprint, or by the anchor point of one of their pads.
See also:
Move with Reference and the other alignment functions certainly work, but setting the grid to a suitable pitch is probably quicker if you have a lot of things to align. You can even assign a name to a grid so you can easily recognize it for later.
This behavior can be disabled under
Preferences–>common–>Editing–>Warp mouse to origin
I hope this helps