In Getting Started in KiCad, chapter 1, it is said that:
Beneath its singular surface, KiCad incorporates an elegant ensemble of the following stand-alone software tools
Does that mean that any of the tools can be built on its own? I’m particularly interested in having a lightweight version of Eeschema. Since my target usage is the documentation of HDL sources, it would be great to avoid installing the full suite. On top of that, adding other pieces when needed would be interesting.
That statement used to be true, but is becoming less true over time. In fact, so far only cvpcb has been removed as a standalone tool, the others are restricted in normal operation but can still be launched as standalone app from the bin directory.
I don’t know how many of the 94 DLLs eeschema depends on, KiCad used to ship with only 9. I don’t know if anyone has ever tried to package the tools separately, might be an interesting idea.
The reason for integrating the tools is to provide a better inter-process communication, KiCad used sockets (maybe still does) which is a bit slow and clunky.