Rectangular regions of polygons, boxes, and wires can be erased with the erase button. The user clicks twice or presses and drags to define the diagonal of the region to be erased. If in layer-specific mode (the S button is active), only the current layer is erased, otherwise all layers are erased. Selected objects are not erased. Wires maintain a constant width, and are cut at the points where the midpoint crosses the boundary of the erased area.
If the Ctrl key is held while the box is completed, the objects under the box will be clipped to the box, rather than being clipped around the box.
While the command is active in physical mode, the cursor will snap to horizontal or vertical edges of existing objects in the layout if the edge is on-grid, when within two pixels. When snapped, a small dotted highlight box is displayed. This makes it much easier to create abutting objects when the grid snap spacing is very fine compared with the display scaling. This feature can be disabled by setting the NoSnapToEdges variable.
When objects are erased in physical mode, they are added to the yank buffer chain. The yank buffer chain has a depth of five, meaning that the contents of the last five erasures are available for placement with the put command.
If the Shift key is held during the erase operation, there is no erasure, however the pieces that would have been erased are added to the yank buffer. If the Ctrl key is also held, the effect is the same, except that the saved pieces are from outside of the box.
When the Ctrl key is held before the box is defined, clicking on a subcell will erase objects within the bounding box of the subcell. This is the inverse of the subcell paint operation in the box command.