Hi I’m really new to PCB design and KiCAD (as in started yesterday). I’ve had a quick search but couldn’t find anything so I’ll ask sorry if this has been asked a million times before.
Is there a freehand rotate?
If not make it so 
(please).
Just seems really clunky not being able to freehand rotate.
Regards
Brian
A selected symbol can be rotated in 90 degree increments using the keyboard ‘R’. This also works for footprints.
Which do you wish to rotate?
The PCB editor allows footprints to be rotated by any angle as “other”, specified in a control.
I sometimes see 45 used for PQFPs to simplify routing.
You really don’t want random angles here as the assembler pick and place machine may have limitations
A few parts can be hand inserted if needed. My most recent home project (of course this was 100% hand built) had some jumpers at weird angles. I had always been skeptical of the need for that, but I found these weird angles to be very helpful in saving space, jumping over multiple tracks on my 2-layer board. I used jumpers so that I would not need to chop up the ground plane too badly. With the modest price of 4 layer PCBs from some fabricators, that might be the best counter-argument to my jumpers.
As others have pointed out, It’s not clear what you want.
If you want to rotate a particular footprint by a degree other than 90, then you can:
Yeah I was wanting to just grab the component and spin it free hand to whatever position I want as going into the edit and changing the direction until you have it right is just repetitive. I had a component to fit on a specific sized board and I had to rotate it to 67 degrees only I didn’t know it was 67 to start with I just had to go in and change it many times until it fit.
Thank you
Brian
That’s how I have done it, too. Yes, it’s tedious, and I’d like to have a WYSIWYG interface, just like when you move a component: you don’t have to enter coordinates, you just grab and drag and see where the item is going.
Thanks for the clarification.
For new feature requests you need to register with and go to Gitlab.
Go to the Kicad program / Help / Report Bug, then create a new issue.
If you click on “Issues” in the left hand column, you will find many requests amongst the bug reports. Just read through a few of those to understand the way new ideas are requested.
There are not many developers, so even if a request is accepted, it may be quite some time before it is included.
I had a component to fit on a specific sized board and I had to rotate it to 67 degrees only I didn’t know it was 67 to start with I just had to go in and change it many times until it fit
You can temporary set the rotation-step to 1°degree and thn use the rotate-hotkey:
A quicker way is to select a line with which you want to align your footprint, and then look at the bottom of the PCB editor, which shows the angle with which the line is drawn.
Then you can open the properties window of your footprin (Hover over it and press e to edit it’s properites) and enter that value.
You can of course also just draw a temporary graphical line to measure some angle and delete it later.
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