I hereby certify that I am not simply asking someone else to design a footprint for me.
This is an auto-generated message that is in place on the “footprints” section of the KiCad.info forum. If I remove it and ask for a footprint to be designed anyway, I understand that I will be subject to forum members telling me to go design my own footprint or referring me to a 3rd party footprint site.
Here’s a screenshot of the PCB editor where this issue occurs. Is there some button I need to press to have the contours appear? I just can’t find it.
although I’m not sure this is the same. With the appearance manager on the right side you can set visibility of almost anything on the PCB. Both with manipulating the “layers” and the “objects” tab pages.
What KiCad version are you using? If it’s V9, then make sure you updated to the latest bug fix release.
Failed to include the Kicad version. I’m stuck to 6 because that’s what I got with my Debian 12 distribution. I haven’t bothered to update the version. Looking at an older version of this project (I have copied everything to a new project), this issue appears there as well. I have no idea when it appeared (I don’t think it was there all along), so unfortunately, I can’t really provide more useful information. Thanks for the reply though.
I hope 6.0.11 with hundreds bugs fixed compared to 6.0.0.
I have practically not been using V6 because V6 was told to be not working at my Win7 PC. And when I got Win10 PC V7 was coming. So I have installed V6 practically only to not upgrade my projects directly from V5 to V7 (there were some problems in first V7 releases with it).
If you have 6.0.11 there should be not such bug, I think. You should be able to get it by manipulating Layers and Objects flags, I hope.
I like Debian as a “base” distribution, but I find maintenance both too difficult and too time consuming, so quite a while I settled on Linux Mint. (Running KiCad V8 because I have to upgrade my Mint version first). But there are backports of KiCad for Debian, so you can install a much more recent version.
And as Piotr wrote, If you’re really “stuck” on V6, then make at least sure you have the latest bug fix release of KiCad V6.
I don’t know your experience level with KiCad. KiCad V6 already has the appearance manager on the right side of the screen. Can you do anything with that?
I am aware of backports and have used them a few times. Right now though, I’m in the middle of developing a rather big project and updating the Kicad version doesn’t sound to me like the wisest thing to do. Apart from backports I could also compile from source, if I want the bleeding edge, also doesn’t sound to me like the wisest thing to do right now.
You could do a flatpack. You can compile the current release from source also. I do. The point is, you aren’t really stuck with an old version because of Debian.
I’m not sure if flapack messes with an apt installed version of Kicad or if it would let you run concurrent versions. Updating directly from 6 to 9 on a large project though probably wouldn’t be seamless/painless regardless.
And even if I do, how will that ensure this behavior will be gone? Perhaps I should have mentioned in my OP, this doesn’t happen with all my projects, just with this one in the screenshot. I don’t think it’s something with the Kicad version, it looks more like something that I have enabled (or disabled) without noticing.
As I wrote before, several people have seen similar behaivior in KiCad V9 too recently.
The thread below suggests to delete the .PRL file from the project.
It’s simple enough to try this on a copy of your project to see if it works for you too. I looked into the .kicad_prl file in one of my projects, and it looks like it has some extra settings for selection filter and layer visibility. I guess KiCad just generates a new one if it’s missing, but I have done no further analysis or experiments.
