In the switching from Eagle to Kicad the first thing I was missing are the bend modes. In Eagle you can very quicky change weather you want to prefer a right turn or left on the fly via the "bend mode". Is there something like this in Kicad 5? I'm aware of the quite powerful drag feature, but I liked the bend mode quite a bit.
Electronic – “Bend mode” equivalent in Kicad 5
eaglekicad
Related Solutions
As far as my understanding goes, you don't truly need a bus, to logically connect the signals at two (or more) locations. When two pieces of wire have the same label, they are considered part of the same net, even if there's no wire drawn between them.
The bus is more of a visual thing, to guide the reader through the schematic.
Here's how to quickly place one:
- Say you start with all five signals located on the right-hand side of an IC, on five neighboring pins
- Draw a short piece of horizontal wire, going out of the topmost pin
- Tap the 'Insert' key four times - KiCAD should draw the wires for the other four pins (*)
- Add a net-name (local label), so that it attaches to the topmost wire. Let's call it SIG1. Tap 'Insert' to get SIG2 ~ SIG5 on the other four wires
- Add "wire to bus entry" for each of the pins - these are the wires drawn at 45 degrees angle
- Place a vertical bus, to "connect" all the wire-to-bus segments. This bus can now be routed to other parts of the schematic
(*) The exact behavior of 'Insert' is configured by the three "Repeat draw/label" settings in the "Preferences" -> "Options" dialog
There's also an "interf_u.sch" schematic which you can check out, it's part of the KiCAD example files
I recommend creating your own. I learnt how to do it by following this small tutorial project by Contextual Electronics.
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Best Answer
You can change the posture of of a track in KiCad using the "/" by default. The command is called "Switch Posture". Note that this can be overridden by connecting to a pad, so if you lose the posture, click prior to the pad to lock the track in place before connecting.