Global Footprints Lost in Upgrade form 4 to 5.0 on OSX

[maxf]

I’ve been running Kicad on a mac (Osx 10.13) successfully for a while. Since I have upgrade to 5.0 release I seem to have completely lost the “global” footprint libraries. They show as ghosts in footprint association and in pcb place but do not let me open or select them. The .pretty files appear to exist and be in the right location.

The only footprints I can see and use are the ones that I created myself in Kicad 4 and are in a local directory.

Where does OSX pick up the user config info? I think it is getting stale, Kicad 4, settings.

[Rene_Poschl]

I had KiCad 4 installed previosly. Now i updated to v5. Now i have some problems with the library setup

Recommended reading: Library management in KiCad version 5 KiCad does not automatically discover libs. Nor does it update the list of libraries on update. If you had KiCad 4.0.x installed previously then i would bet you still have parts of its configuration surviving. Most importantly the fp-lib-table. This file controls which footprint libs you use. If this is the case then you probably still run the on demand online footprint libs originally “distributed” with KiCad 4.0.x installations. The …

[maxf]

Thanks. What I was missing was the location of the “config directory”.

Apparently on OSX it is located at

/Users/me/Library/Preferences/kicad

where “me” is your short user name.

Once I located it, I deleted the footprint and symbol tables. I then started kicad which recreated the correct ones.

So to get a clean install from Kicad for OSX.

1. Delete Kicad from the applications folder
2. Delete /Library/kicad
3. Delete /Users/me/Library/Application Support/kicad
4. Delete /Users/me/Library/Preferences/kicad

Then, and only then, install kicad 5.

(IMHO, this is a non-obviously location. I never did find it in the documentation or forums. It is obscure, rarely used, and does not show under default search options).