Longtime Eagle user trying to get to grips with Kicad.
Is there any way that I can configure the manual router so that it behaves more like the one in Eagle, in that when routing a track, clicking the mouse button fixes the track as routed up till that point? I find it very annoying how Kicad won’t do that making it harder to ‘draw out’ where I want the track to go. If I’m manually routing it I wnt just that I don’t want the router trying to minimize the track length all the time and drawing a 45ded track when moving horizontally.
I have no experience (except for 1/2 hour long ago) with Eagle, so I do not know what is “different”.
But there will always be differences between different programs, especially if you magnify small details.
With a lot of things that are only “different” than you are used to, you get assustomed after some time.
By default PCBnew fixes upto the trace segment with each mouseclick, unless the mouse is positioned on an “end point” for a trace (such as a pad the trace can be routed to).
But a bunch of things can be tweaked. For manual routing you can find some settings in:
PCBnew -> Preferences -> General
I think KiCaD behaves a bit more to your likings if you turn of “Use double segmented tracks”, but you probably want to experiment with the settings there.
Another simple setting is to hit the shash “/” to “switch track posture” during drawing of a trace.
But don’t expect your first PCB in KiCad to be finished fast, nor perfect. KiCad takes some time getting used to. Try not to worry too much about too small details.
A very handy (Really extremely usefull) feature of KiCad is the Interactive Router. If you hold on to the idea you want your traces to be exactly were you want them, you will hate it, but if you learn to use it you will love it. The general idea is to draw some traces without optimizing too much and then push them aside (For example for making room for a via) to line stuff up neatly.
As @Prime might run the current stable release (KiCad version 4.0.x) we might need to add that the interactive router is only available in the OpenGl canvas. By default KiCad 4 is in the “default” (legacy) canvas.
The KiCad scheme is smarter, but what it actually does, is lock the previous corner when you click.
You can make that behave very similar to what you want, by doing mouse clicks before the 45’ appears.
Most designers want 45’ traces, & obstacle hugging, and prefer being able to route a total path, with least mouse clicks.
If you want to avoid 45’, and click more often, you can also do that ?