Interesting question. It doesn’t seem to be documented in the manual for either 5.1 or 5.99.
I’m playing around with it in 5.99 and I don’t notice a difference either way, but I may not be doing the right thing.
I was expecting it to do the same thing as “Mouse drag track behavior” in Preferences -> PCB Editor -> Editing Options (location/language might be different in 5.1).
Ok, I see the difference now. It basically controls if a click-and-drag operation (when the Select item tool is active!) is equivalent to a grab or a move.
The confusing thing is that the setting is in the Interactive Router Settings dialog which can only be reached from the Route tracks menu but the setting itself only has an effect when the Route tracks mode is not active.
That setting decides if dragging track using mouse uses Interactive Router or not so I see nothing wrong to set in Interactive Router Settings if that settings are also used when you use mouse at track.
That’s what I was expecting to happen, but it’s not what I actually see. The setting in preferences (Preferences -> PCB Editor -> Editing Options -> Track Mouse Drag Behavior) seems to be honored, but the router settings one is ignored for me?
move_drag
Even if it worked, the UX isn’t great here. You can only get to this setting when you have the router tool activated, but the setting only matters when the router tool is inactive. My feeling is this setting should be removed; it’s already duplicated with the preferences option and they aren’t kept in sync. Also, the preferences option has 3 states (move, 45deg drag, free angle drag) but the router settings option only has 2…
I haven’t tried in 5.1, maybe it works properly there. It works in 5.1, not in 5.99 (for me)
Application: KiCad PCB Editor
Version: (5.99.0-12934-ge950278637), release build
Libraries:
wxWidgets 3.0.5
libcurl/7.79.1 OpenSSL/1.1.1l zlib/1.2.11 brotli/1.0.9 zstd/1.5.0 libidn2/2.3.2 libpsl/0.21.1 (+libidn2/2.3.0) libssh2/1.9.0 nghttp2/1.45.0
Platform: Linux 5.10.72-1-lts x86_64, 64 bit, Little endian, wxGTK, KDE, x11
Build Info:
Date: Oct 23 2021 18:40:58
wxWidgets: 3.0.5 (wchar_t,wx containers,compatible with 2.8) GTK+ 3.24
Boost: 1.76.0
OCC: 7.5.0
Curl: 7.79.1
ngspice: 35
Compiler: GCC 11.1.0 with C++ ABI 1016
Build settings:
KICAD_USE_OCC=ON
KICAD_SPICE=ON