KiCad 8 installation issues

Software
1

I updated to KiCad 8, now to 8.0.1 and I’m having problems with plugins not working. (Windows 10)
Firstly, as with the update from 6.0 to 7.0, KiCad erased all my custom symbol and footprint libraries from the library manager so I had to reinstall them all despite selecting what I though was the option to retain them?

I have a number of plugins I use, for example KiKit, replicate layout … Since the new install only some of those plugins appear as icons at the top of the PCB editor window, the rest have dissapeared and only appear in the external plugins menu.

I’ve just tried to reinstall KiKit and a few other tools using the command prompt and they installed OK, but are not recognised after install - typing ‘kikit --help’ reports

‘kikit’ is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.

The same with anything else I install from the command line.

During installation I get warnings like this:

WARNING: The scripts kikit-info.exe and kikit.exe are installed in ‘C:\Users\myusername\OneDrive\Documents\KiCad\8.0\3rdparty\Python311\Scripts’ which is not on PATH.
Consider adding this directory to PATH or, if you prefer to suppress this warning, use --no-warn-script-location.

When I look in the configure paths tool, I can see:

KICAD8_3RD_PARTY C:\Users\myusername\OneDrive\Documents\KiCad\8.0\3rdparty

Does anyone have any clue how to start fixing this or am I looking at a complete reinstall?

2

If they are in the menu then they are installed just fine. You can add the button back in the preferences → action plugins.

That will only work in kicad command prompt, not standard windows cmd, make sure you run it for kicad 8 too, if you have multiple versions installed.

3

If they are in the menu then they are installed just fine. You can add the button back in the preferences → action plugins.

Thanks, thats the information I couldn’t find searching online!

That will only work in kicad command prompt, not standard windows cmd, make sure you run it for kicad 8 too, if you have multiple versions installed.

Yes, obviously - I was following the installation instructions for kikit which tell you to verify the install using this command in the Kicad command prompt.

I decided to uninstall everything and reinstall it all, this has fixed the command line issues - Although I thought I stripped out everything from Kicad with the uninstall it doesn’t remove a lot of back end stuff because after reinstalling Kicad 8.0.1 and trying to install Kikit, it told me kikit was already installed, but this time the verification worked - I can only assume my previous install went wrong …

4

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