How can I avoid this happening ? IE a non 90 deg wire line in schematic ?
I cant find any ‘constrain wires to 90 deg, H V, 90/45 etc’ in preferences or schematic options
There is such a thing in PCB editor for traces.
Schematic Editor / Preferences / Preferences / Schematic Editor / Editing Options / Line Drawing Mode
And as far as I know this is the default. I am not absolutely sure whether this always keeps all lines at 90 degree multiples. In older KiCad versions lines were still drawn at other angles while dragging a block for example.
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oh there it is,
thanks Paul
I guess I am still thinking ‘WIRE’ not line. A line in Altium is a graphical drawing primitive, not a electrical wire, hence my (continuing) confusion…
Default is
The confusion is understandable. I had to verify myself that this setting affects both graphical lines and electrical wires. It may be a good idea to split this in two separate settings.
If you don’t want to use the preferences dialog you could also click onto the 3 icons on the left toolbar. Or use “Shift+Space” as hotkey.
It may be a good idea to split this in two separate settings
I don’t think so. No real benefit, instead more complicated user interface. Two settings, commands and hotkeys to remember.
It may sound inappropriate, but even users with many years experience in other pcb design software should consider reading the tutorial and manual. There is a complete passage about the different drawing modes in the section Drawing and editing wires: Schematic Editor | 7.0 | English | Documentation | KiCad
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Fair point. I am completely not used to using toolbar icons. Everything in altium is mostly done with cascaded contextual keyboard commands, you end up having muscle memory for your favourite 100 tasks…
getting into menus, in kicad uses ALT-(menu item). In Altium menu item entry is a single key
So (p) (opens place menu) then (v for via ) etc.
However, looks like I could replicate this behaviour in Kicad my my own GUI changes.
The problem is, then I deviate from mainline, that’s a problem … and if I want those changes in the mainline, many users might not want them, since that substantially changes the UI behaviour. My needs in Kicad are all productivity improvements, generally the kicad features are already there , with a few exceptions (diff trace editing, multi grids with own local origins etc) .
I have colleagues that are proficient in both Kicad and Altium and they say, yeah, the productivity due to the way the GUi and hotkeys work is lower. But of course it doesnt have 10 million bucks a year in development thrown at it like Altium !
ahh managed to turn off bold. a hypen at the end fo the text put paragraph in bold.
Or maybe “Wire/Line drawing mode:” for those who have allergic reactions to reading manuals 
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funny. the kicad doco is very good. it’s a bit slow for an impatient person to read, but well detailed. almost needs a “kicad for experienced altium users”
I’m not here to get out cheap with Kicad, I’m pretty sure using kicad will cost me substantially compared to altium (dotation money, and lost productivity due to tool productivity limits) .
But the evil empire now taken some puzzling marketing / licensing / money grab steps, and is still not fixing long term bugs.
The tool is now feeling congested in terms of features and options, 1000 ways to route a trace. Too many ways to skin a cat can be a bad thing.
Kicad actually feels refreshing is a weird sort of simplistic way with only a few ways to skin various cats.
Not to mention sluggish and just lately seems to not process the windows message queue faithfully in the current beta build. But its also possible I have so deep neural altium method pathways in my brain that there’s no going elsewhere.
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