How to route through obstacles and postpone DRC cleanup?

I am looking to switch from Eagle to KiCad. In Eagle I could draw routes any which way, and fix the DRC errors later. This behavior is important in case we want to make an adjustment that involves moving several routes and/or footprints to get the layout back to DRC clean.

However KiCad won’t let me draw a route through an existing route or pad on the same layer. How do I override this behavior so that I can draw the route in a way that creates a temporary DRC violation?

Press command / control (depending on OS) before left clicking to commit a segment to tell KiCad “i promise i mean to put this here”.
You can also just change the router settings to ignore DRC entirely and let you route however you like.

I tried all the modifiers (control, shift, meta, alt) before clicking but it still wouldn’t set the point on top of an obstacle.

However, I found the option you suggested, by right-clicking the route net button → Interactive Router Settings → Highlight Collisions → Allow DRC violations. I think that will work for me. Thank you!

1 Like

Ah, indeed, I was misremembering. The trick with Command (on Mac anyways) only works if you are already in a DRC violation state with the green highlight and then attempting to drag things.