Electronic – Kicad trace thickness and autorouter

Create a part out of two connected SMT pads, and connect it between two parts of a net. Each pad will be a different port, and thus will allow you to change the net, but the part itself will just be a small rectangle on the board between different trace widths (i.e. a short). If possible, remember to take the solder mask regions out of the footprint (so that the entire footprint gets solder mask).

You can rotate components while keeping wires connected by clicking g for grab, then clicking r for rotate. It's very convenient.

But like you noted, it doesn't keep any right angles you chose, and instead connects them with the shortest route from the closest break-point in the wire. By breakpoint I mean some point that isn't a straight line.

I don't know if there's a way to force the wires to behave how you ask. There might be a setting to forbid any angled lines in the schematic. And then that setting might behave how you want when you rotate. But you can imagine it's hard to keep wires "neat" when you go about rotating them from the initial configuration. It would require the program to dynamically organize the wires itself.