Previously I would have called Kicad 5 the best software available for Linux. It was an outstanding piece of work, one which worked and never crashed - ever.
Kicad 6
PCB design - crashes frequently, especially when hitting B to infill. I’m now used to Ctrl-S before hitting B.
Schematic design - sometimes pressing on the field to control a component name makes that field go or look blank and then input doesn’t work. I come back out and reenter the component edit and it’ll usually work.
Schematic design - the grid system is off with Kicad 5 schematics which generally means I have to move all the components on an existing schematic to get them to align on the new grid before they’ll connect up.
There are others but these are the main irritants so far in my experience. I love Kicad and wish the authors had not regressed the software as they’ve done.
PCB design - crashes frequently, especially when hitting B to infill. I’m now used to Ctrl-S before hitting B.
If this is happening that frequently I would report a bug on Gitlab. You will need an account there and then click Help / Report Bug.
Schematic design - the grid system is off with Kicad 5 schematics which generally means I have to move all the components on an existing schematic to get them to align on the new grid before they’ll connect up.
Schematic design - sometimes pressing on the field to control a component name makes that field go or look blank and then input doesn’t work. I come back out and reenter the component edit and it’ll usually work.
This is a bug in the UI toolkit that KiCad uses. There’s been a huge amount of time spent trying to fix it without complete success. I won’t link the bug reports but there have been a lot of them
Schematic design - the grid system is off with Kicad 5 schematics which generally means I have to move all the components on an existing schematic to get them to align on the new grid before they’ll connect up.
If this happens every time, it’s worth reporting this as a bug with a simple testcase project attached. As an workaround, in v6 you can easily fix this by selecting all, right clicking, and clicking “align elements to grid”
Yes, problem is the grid’s from v5 don’t appear to align up with v6. So far I have to move all the components to align with the new grid and rewire. Annoying.
I would if I had something simple but I can probably come up with something, let me work on it today and I’ll attach. There may be a less obvious way to resolve it.
(the grid alignment that is, not the hugely irritating crashing)
There are many other quirks as well, one was how a track would always resort to using the track width of another coming to the component, overriding the current selection. I suppose it was like the first track set the default for that net and is was used thereafter. Odd, it seems to have reverted in 6.0.6 to the previous behaviour - it’s fairly silly to assume all components on a net are going to use the same track width.
I find the semi-transparent layers to be much more difficult to work with on 4+ layer boards. I’d love to go back to the non-fancy but productive colour method.
When that button is “On” then, if you start a new track from an existing track, it uses the widht of that track for the new tracks. When that button is “Off”, then KiCad always uses the track width of the netclass of a net when starting new tracks. (Or it uses one of the “Pre-defined sizes” if you’ve set that in the drop down box just to the left of the mouse cursor from the screenshot.
This behavior is the same in KiCad V5 and V6. I’m (also) guessing that you’ve tweaked a bunch of settings in KiCad V5 long ago, and then forgot that you tweaked those settings, and some of your annoyances are only from KiCad using it’s default settings without your tweaks.
I find the semi-transparent layers to be much more difficult to work with on 4+ layer boards. I’d love to go back to the non-fancy but productive colour method.
Already played with the transparency-settings in the appearance-manager–>objects-tab on the right side of the screen? (you could also set
Also tried the 3 display-modes standard-view → dimmed view (active layer with full color, all other dimmed) → Hide view (only the single active layer is displayed)?
And lastly the possibility to pre-define different layer-settings and switch easily between them could also help with getting a clear view of the board-design.
I apologise about the track width, that magic button is what I’m missing. It must have somehow reset when going to v6 and I didn’t know about it.
Another bug, when selecting and copying the footprint text from one component and pasting into another it somehow manages to copy the “Footprint” text and inserts this instead. Only does it occasionally. I guess the “Footprint” label is defined as selectable so with dragging with the mouse it can be included. This is a guess.
