Currently the KiCAD-libs are installed in the installation dir under windows, which is not the best choice, as these are updated by the software itself, which often does not have write access to its own directory. How do you solve that problem? Wouldn’t it be better to have the libs e.g. in the user, or general user directory, or under ProgramData? Target3001! e.g. stores its libs here ‘c:\Users<USERNAME>\AppData\Roaming\ibf\TargetV14…’
I’ve KiCad installed outside Program Files: C:\KiCad4. This will resolve UAC problems.
99% of my KiCad project uses only my libraries from other disk so any KiCad update does not affect my libraries.
Remember that KiCad is multiplatform application. Each supported OS have their own mechanisms. Good support of each mechanism it’s a lot of work and time in testing.
Look at the Footprint Library Table. There are still some unresolved quirks.
I also copy installed libraries from Program Files\Kicad to Users\myname\Appdata\Roaming.
Putting a directory at the root of C is not recommended and UAC tries hard to prevent you updating anything in Program Files.
Making KiCad take these at startup never seems to work and always seems to involve managing paths
You could do what I did here: Classroom installation of KiCad stable (4.0.4) and use/modify library paths to suit your needs. However, the path to the KiCad installation directory will still appear in the library managers since it is hard-coded in the software. Fortunately it appears in second or third place, so the libraries on the path you defined yourself will be the first to be pulled in.
Since KiCad can’t escape from the Linux accretions (Unfortunately these are my observations), the introduction of mechanisms to put whole program data in their proper place under Windows it is rather slim.
I have the KiCad programs in C:\Program Files and I have a KiCad directory in \Users\David\Kicad where my projects, modules and local libraries live.
This works nearly perfectly, only adding libraries to a project insists on first looking in Program Files
you lost me there. i thought i read a few posts above that you werent putting libraries in the Program Files dir.
Sounds like you are having good luck with your install setup. Just to clarify, are you letting the installer copy the libraries to the Program Files dir, or refusing that and later downloading them to a location in your \Users\username… dir.
