I’m new to Kicad and had a large parts library in my previous CAD program. Many of the symbols weren’t great so I’m taking the opportunity to recreate each symbol as I need it. As I am learning, it’s an iterative process and I need to edit the part a few times as I build a schematic, but each time it opens the version attached to the schematic and it’s an extra click to get to the library version. It’s not the click I mind so much as having to remember to do this as we have a lot of designs and updates that are accidentally only local could really negatively impact us. Is there a way to set KiCad (I’m on 9.0) to open the library version of the part?
Select a symbol and press Ctrl + Shift + E (or Cmd, for Mac) to go straight to the library version of the symbol as opposed to editing the instance in the schematic. You do then have to remember to update that local instance.
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Mind blown! Thank you SO much.
I searched the documentation and couldn’t find anything about this. I’m still learning the Kicad terminology – if anyone has any pointers for how I could have found this in the docs, please let me know!
You will find some documentation in https://docs.kicad.org/ > Schematic Editor Reference Manual > Symbols and Symbol Libraries > Creating and editing symbols.
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When I was moving to KiCad (2017) I also used that opportunity to edit my all symbols and footprints.
I open symbol editor from main KiCad application and never did it from schematic (I’m even not sure if in V4 it was possible).
In your case I would just have both windows opened. Because of KiCad I have connected two monitors to my PC (mainly to have schematic at one and PCB at the other) so I would have symbol editor at one screen and schematic at the second.
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