Hello everyone. Is there a key shortcut or menu item someplace in KiCad 8 that will refresh (basically reload) the symbol and footprint libraries? I’ve been doing a lot of library work lately setting up a new database and it’s really annoying to have to close everything, shut down KiCad and restart it every time I make an edit to one of the libraries or the database.
Thanks!
-Jeff
I am not sure if anything like this is implemented. (Probably not).
Ideally, KiCad would keep track of file date and refresh cash automatically when file dates have changed. Maybe this is worth a feature request, but I have not checked whether a request for this is already posted on gitlab (There are currently 1400 open issues for KiCad). I also do not know what sort of performance penalty would be associated with this.
I believe this is timeout based, but I’m not sure on the details. I’ve also found it tedious to have to restart kicad to reload libraries on demand in exactly this situation (building database libraries). If you wanted to make a feature request on gitlab, I would upvote it 
Edit: There is a View → Refresh (F5) item in the symbol editor. I assumed this is purely a visual refresh, but I just tried clicking this and it did very briefly flash up a “Loading Symbol Libraries” dialog. Based on that it’s possible that this does at least a partial reload? Perhaps you could test if it solves your problem with your database libraries?
The view->refresh seems to be just for the display, far as I can tell. If I was to submit a feature request I would make versioning of all symbols and footprints (and library entries if using a database) a higher priority. Especially as KiCad becomes fit for larger and larger projects versioning everything will become much more critical to error-free projects.
eh, personally I wouldn’t refrain from making feature requests based on your desired priority.
There are many, many open feature requests and developers prioritize from the open bugs/requests based on what they think is important, what users think is important (this is partially based on the “thumbs up” metric), and what they’re interested in implementing. I don’t think skipping one feature request is going to move the needle perceptibly for another specific request.
I would also guess (without knowing much about the code) that a manual reload feature is probably a lot easier to implement, too.
Do you have an open feature request for the versioning support you mentioned? I’m not exactly sure what you’re referring to.