Hi everyone,
I am new to KiCad (just started ca. 3 weeks ago) and have still a lot to learn and thus I am seeking your help/advice.
My questions is: can one cutomise individual tool bars in KiCad e.g. in Schematic,- component and or foot print entry? If yes is there any document or video available explaining this?
The reason I am asking this is that practically in every tutorial video on KiCad, the KiCad GUI seems to be different. This produces a problem for the beginners like me who try to reproduce the steps in Tutorial but one’s own KiCad GUI and screen dialogues are different.
As an expample I have uploaded a word file showing four screen shots in total (two for component editor and two for footprint editor each). Two screen shots are from a tutorial and two from my installtion of KiCad. Although both us us seem to be using the KiCad version 5.0.2, the tool bars and thereafter the dialogue boxes are different.
Can someone point me to some document or video please?
Thanks and best regards.
WxWidgets lib use system native look depending from Linux/Apple/Windows. Dockable toolbars are on V6 roadmap and you should find the basic equivalent entries depending from your version
Any particular reason you landed on KiCad 5.0.2 - this is quite old and there have been many bug fixes since then. The current version is 5.1.4 and most people are using this. You are right though - much of the documentation lags behind the software development.
There are some additional resources linked here which might be worth exploring.
@John,
No, no particular reason at all. I suppose I got the version that was probably available at that time on the web site. It is only after reading your reply I realise that I should probably deinstall the version 5.0.2 and download the latest version.
B.t.w. does KiCad have an automatic reminder service if a newer version is available on the net?
Unfortunately, no we don’t have any automatic reminders of new versions in the software. If you hang about the forum though, people usually will post an announcement when a new version is available.
If you use a feed aggregator, the KiCad blog is easy to follow: https://kicad.org/blog/index.xml. There’s not much traffic and new releases are announced there.
As Ian said, you can usually find announcements here, even beforehand, but this is difficult to follow unless you check the forum daily (or sometimes even hourly), and there’s no guarantee that anyone writes here.
In your screenshots your own version looks like 5.1. Differences between that and 5.0 are expected. In 5.1 there should be no toolbar actions which aren’t available in the main menu, so you can find the actions in the menu.
Indeed the UI - the menu structures and dialogs - are the major difference between 5.0 and 5.1. It makes following the instructions a bit difficult. And it’s natural that there are older resources available for older versions. It’s not an ideal situation but we have to live with that.
Even though the developers have entertained the idea of having customizable toolbars, it’s not possible at the moment and I’m not very optimistic about that for 6.0, either. Especially being able to select what is in the toolbars (a la Firefox “Customise”) means some amount of work.
