I need to move a 40 pin connector to the right without rotation. This is not a problem but I notice that although grabbing or moving moves the connector, it makes a mess of the wires. It seems that once they are messed up they cannot be fixed other than by deleting them and drawing them again. I cannot grab one end of the wire and straighten it for example. If moving the component causes a kink in the wire then it cannot be straightened either.
I have seen advice given to someone else in another forum to draw the diagram right first time. If that is true, then I am left wondering what KiCad is for. If I have to draw circuits using another tool to get them right before I can draw them in KiCad I might as well stick with the other tool. In my case that would be paper and pencil.
Anyway, is it the case that components can be moved/dragged but the wires have to be redrawn because KiCad 6 does not have a way to move the endpoints of wires? I would not be surprised to learn that there is a way to do it but if there is, I can’t find it.
Edit: Oops, misread the original post. This was a response for the PCB…
It is possible in KiCad to drag a footprint while keeping tracks connected, but this function is quite limited, and it only works well if there is quite a lot of room around the footprint.
Endpoints of tracks can also be moved, tracks can get merged if you extend them by starting a new track on the endpoint of an old segment and more, such as for example PCB Editor / Tools / Cleanup Tracks and Via’s.
This does happen once in a while, and when it does happen, DRC gets confused, and usually those wires can indeed not be dragged apart anymore, and you have to delete and redraw them. Quite often you can limit the damage by starting with disconnection tracks a bit further from your footprint, then move the footprint with the still connected tracks as a block, and then re-connect it further away.
Sometimes it also works to bump a track or via into the overlapping track. Sometimes the Interactive router then re-routes the offending track without DRC violations. It is far from perfect, but I expect such things to slowly improve as KiCad evolves further. It may also help to delete a few of the most offending tracks, which also gives the interactive router more room to do it’s thing. If you’ve done this a few times you develop a sort of feeling for what works and what does not work and this speeds up the process considerably.
But placing the connectors in the right spot the first time is by far the quickest option, even if you spend some 10 extra minutes to find a good place for them. Good footprint placement is a very important step in PCB design. A PCB with a good footprint placement may be easy to route, while a bad footprint placement may make the PCB impossible to route.
KiCad’s behavior in this isn’t fully intuitive but there could still exist a way to do this. We would need a bit more information, a screencast of a situation and your attempts would be great. Even better if you can attach an example project which you are trying to edit and show it in the screencast so that we could try it.
Moving a part is pretty straigh forward, but breaks the connections. Extending the wires afterwards (by dragging the endpoint) is the way I usually do it.
Dragging is somewhat more involved. Unless the part is really simple, I prefer looking at the schematic to see where a block can be defined so the dragging is mainly linear. Then I drag the block. It’s not always 100% possible, but mostly only a couple of wires are kinked or angled (this is for 5.1 and 6.0).
I have no suggestion for a “one size fits all”.
In the Schematic Editor you can do quite a lot with the G shortcut key.
You can select a block, and then drag it to another location. The block itself will get moved, and connections to the outside will get slanted lines, but you can often select another block and draw them straight again.
If you hover over the middle of a wire and press G, then you can drag a wire while keeping it’s orientation the same. If you hover over a corner and press G, then you can move a corner, and you can use this also to straighten slanted wires.
Drag the symbol with the ‘g’ key right click the wire and select ‘break wire’ .
It may be possible to add a shortcut key to this but I have not tried to.
Once again thanks for the info and that works well. I tried using the G shortcut key earlier but I didn’t realise that I could hover over a corner to just grab the corner to drag it.
Thanks for the reply and info. With your help and others I’ve found out how to move and drag wires. I didn’t know I could grab just the corner or end point of a wire. Having learned that it all becomes clear.
you can do quite a lot with the G shortcut key.