Moving wires - EESchema

Ive used Altium designer for a while now, and decided to move to an other application along with my co-worker since it had a rather significant amount of bugs.

Now Ive started using KiCad Ive ran into a question regarding the movement of wires.
Is there an option to move the horizontal line (shown in picture 1 ) in one single action.
The only way ive found is to Press G on the 4 intersections / angles and move them up/down

Any help would be appreciated.

You can drag a box around what you want to move, and then switch to a drag mode by pressing [tab] while dragging.

1 Like

Thanks for the quick reply
When using a selection box I end up with either a situation where even unwanted tracks get selected (A)
Or when Pressing Tab, Not everything gets selected (expansion is just one segment further)

Any suggestions would be appriciated! :smiley:

You can of course also drag a box around your 4 IC’s and all resistors etc, and move those.

But more general, the drawing capabilities for KiCad are pretty basic, and moving stuff around is just one of the many things that take a bit of time.

Best is of course to draw your schematic right the first time, so nothing has to be moved around later. It helps to have a bit of experience, and also, keeping some distance between schematic parts, so they can be moved as individual rectangular blocks makes it easier to manage your schematic. There is no need to cram everything close together on a single small sheet.

I also often make extensive use of hierarchical designs. For example, a power supply section with connector(s) voltage regulater and bulk and decoupling capacitors is often a separate sheet

Just by seeing a circuit repeated 4 times like in the screenshot i would guess that this particular design might really benefit from proper abstraction layers (=hierarchical design) Hierarchical or flat schematic design, what is best for me? (How to deal with multi page schematics?)

Thank you for the reply. That is good to take into consideration while switching to an other PCB design tool.

we have had the discussion about using abstraction layers, but for us it just doesnt work. It makes problem solving a lot harder in our opinion since you cant just follow wires to their destination.

Abstraction layers have been specifically developed to make problem solving easier. The main reason being that it introduces knowledge domains allowing multiple people to work on their part without needing to know the full details of the rest of the system.

There are full books written about the benefits. (Increased options for design reuse, better maintainability by having separated knowledge domains, different designers can focus on different abstraction levels and only need to know the defined interfaces making it possible for a large team to work on the same system, …)
Books are mainly about software design or system on chip design but the same principles apply to electronics design as well. (I suspect there will be books focusing on pcb design by use of abstraction layers within the next few years.)
Only problem right now is that older electronic engineers (and probably even younger ones that did not also get training in system on chip design) might not be properly trained in the use of abstraction layers. (This will hopefully change soon.)

1 Like

But more general, the drawing capabilities for KiCad are pretty basic, and moving stuff around is just one of the many things that take a bit of time
yep - that is correct.

This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.