We have bought Protel 3 in 1997. It was our most expensive investment in any tool ever. And distributor didn’t said a word that if we will wait 3 months the next version will come having the feature of pushing other tracks while routing. Protel 3 had no that. Practically the best solution to push 10 tracks running in parallel was to delete them all and route them from scratch once more. When we said that they are ‘not fair’, only what they offered us was 20% discount for the next version. Spending in total 180% of price to have it, was certainly too much for us.
So during next 20 years what we were doing most often was deleting a set of tracks and routing them once more. And our decision was to never ever buy anything from that firm.
In 2016 or 2017 I found the KiCad demo videos showing that when you route track the others are pushed. It was enough argument for me to switch from Protel to KiCad. Those time it was KiCad 4.0.6 but I have read that 4.0.7 will be soon so I decided to wait a moment reading in the meantime all documentations I can find.
In my opinion there are lot improvements between versions. The most important for me:
4->5 - via stitching without need to route track through all vias,
5->6 - I can color connection lines and I can hide GND lines (very helpful in placement if my designs have all bottom GND),
6->7 - I installed it recently and had no time yet to look through all its possibilities.
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