I just installed v6. I’ve never used KiCad before.
I’m not able to add a symbol to a schematic. Nothing shows as a preview and there is no title block on the screen either.
I installed it on another PC and it seems to work just fine.
Are they both the same OS? What OS are we talking about here?
Can you add a screenshot?
Image attached.
It works on an old Windows 8.1 laptop.
Problems are on a Windows 10 Pro, 64 bit virtual machine.
I installed the last build for v5 and had the same issue in the VM.
Don’t know if this is the problem or not, but there are a bunch of weird graphics problems that crop up in VMs and running in a virtual machine is not supported by KiCad.
You could try changing between accelerated and fallback graphics (Preferences → Display Options → change the rendering engine setting). You could also try playing with the graphics drivers & settings in your VM but I don’t know where to start.
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Thanks! Switching to Fallback graphics seemed to do the trick.
I see that you say running in a VM is not supported so I will keep that in mind if I have future issues. The VM is really my preferred development environment these days…
Glad to hear it!
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Can you say a word or two - why?
I have never even tried VM. I just would like to know what are the advantages I don’t know.
A few reasons.
At my day job, I work for an OEM of industrial equipment. Some of our suppliers have software packages that are known to interfere with each other. Putting each supplier’s software in a separate VM solved this issue.
I sometimes travel to do technical work. I can keep a copy of the necessary VMs on a large USB memory stick or external hard disk. If my laptop crashes or dies, I can buy or borrow another PC and be back up and running in less than an hour. (Some of the software packages I use are quite large to download and take several hours to fully install and configure.)
I have to support some old equipment that uses a piece of SCADA software which only supports a single installed version. So I have about different 8 different VMs for each SCADA release, going back 15+ years.
Some old equipment I support requires the use of ancient software that will only run in a Windows XP DOS box. The Windows XP machine runs just fine as a VM.
No risk of installing a new piece of unknown software and corrupting my entire PC.
Basically, my host PC is restricted to MS Office and email. Then I have numerous VMs as described above. One VM is what I call my “sandbox”. I use it for stuff like KiCad, Microchip Studio, and the million other utilities that I need to install but don’t wish to clutter up the OS on my host machine.
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Thanks for explanation.
I have at my desk 3 PCs (one of them is XP). It looks that going above the number 3 will force me to apply your solution 
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On MacOS this seems to happen repeatably in the Symbol Editor window. The solution is to double-click the item.(Battery_Cell in your example).
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