Eeschema UI blocks for ~10s for each component chooser selection

[paulvdh]

KiCad V6 is not coming that soon. It can still be about half a year, but that was what I thought 7 months ago too.

KiCad-nightly V5.99 is not a finished product.
Nightly versions are a common practice for open source projects. It is a way in which normal users can help with finding and reporting bugs.

Is it a good idea to use a nightly build version?

Short answer: If you have to ask, you should probably stick to the stable release. What are nightly builds? As the name implies, nightly builds are generated every night from the current master branch of the source repository. They are meant to allow a wider audience to more easily test new features. Note: Nightlies are always structured X.99. They are not part of the current release cycle. They are always part of the development of the next release cycle. eg. 7.99 nightlies will become 8.0.…

Once a project is saved in KiCad-nightly V5.99 you’re committed. File formats have changed significantly and there is no (easy) way back to V5.1.x for that project.
If you are a company and your livelihood depends on a properly working KiCad, then it’s probably not a good idea to migrate now.

All that said. KiCad-nightly V5.99 is getting quite usable, and (most) bugs are getting smaller, though it still happens occasionally that a bug is introduced that makes KiCad unusable (which usually gets squished in one or two days).