I made a bit of a mistake and need to move a few 28 pin devices. I have traces routed all around and in between pins. Usually when I move a part, the traces stay behind, making a big mess. Is there a way to keep traces connected to the part while it moves?
You can hover the mouse over a footprint, press d for drag and drag the footprint around. At the moment this function is still rudimentary. KiCad just does some stretching, shrinking and shifting of tracks, but no full push & shove to attempt to reroute the connections. Therefore it is likely to generate DRC violations, and with the default settings KiCad does not accept DRC violations during dragging and refuses to accept the final position if this occurs. You can change this behavior with PCB Editor / Route / Interactive Router Settings by setting Mode / Highlight collisions and this enables Options / Allow DRC violations.
This also only works for moving a single footprint. Moving footprints after they have been routed is a big PITA. Most often you are forced to do this because there is no way to route the tracks around your footprint, which means the area around the footprint is chock full of tracks and you have hardly any room for moving or dragging the footprint. And the root cause is of course lack of experience which resulted in a not working footprint placement.
Sometimes it works best to do a block move (and fix DRC violations afterward) Sometimes it sorta works to first delete a part of the tracks, then do some moves and reconnect the deleted tracks.
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