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Comment by cmroanirgo | Hacker News Reader

A comment from the reddit link which makes their alternate seem appropriate (I haven't used kiCad since around 2010, so have no opinion either way):

> What KiCad does have is "push and shove" routing, which is really nice. As you're trying to manually route a new trace, it will push existing traces out of the way as you incrementally route the new one. This is a huge time saver as you manually route your board.

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The push&shove router is one of KiCad's best features. I'd take that over an autorouter any day.

Why is this an either/or scenario? Anyone who has the option (including myself on EaglePCB back in the mists of time) seems to prefer manually setting copper pours, running the "important" signals (whatever that means in the context) etc. and then letting the autorouter do the trivial, fiddly, numerous traces for them. It's not a fire-and-forget automatic PCB layout generator, more like cruise control. Nobody says "the handling on my new car is great, I'd take it over cruise control any day."

Strangely I have heard people say similar things about their cars.

Now that I think of it, if I could just get a traditional manual clutch shoved in between my car's automatic transmission and the driveshaft, that would basically solve all my issues with it. Autos are fine these days for all but the most 'spirited' driving, but it still gripes me to not be able to precisely control that front/rear torque split coming into the corner.

That's equivalent to how I use Altium. Autorouter takes too much work to set up the design rules. I've never designed anything super dense though.

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