Seems a UI refresh with new icon showed up for latest Nigthly:
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The icons were not only cosmetical; there were licencing issues with some old icons which are apparently now solved.
EDIT: discussion about the new icons here: New icons in nightly.
FWIW, we don’t know of any licensing issues with the old icons. The trouble is that we don’t know that there aren’t any either. (In other words, we had no paper trail for some of them.)
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Please keep this topic clean form further discussions, you can start a new topic and call person by name if needed, like this: @Muz.
There is now a “Migrate Libraries…” button in Manage Symbol Libraries that will let you do a save-as-current-format on all selected rows (and update the table rows as well).
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It has already been told that some tools have alternatives which can be selected by a long press or mouse drag:
I didn’t find a mention about hidden tool configuration options. Some tool buttons have a context menu (Right Mouse Button menu) with which you can change or find some options quickly.
- Router
- Zone
- Grid display (although this isn’t a KiCad “tool”)
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Corner rounding is back, working better now
arc_placement_3
Note: this is just for placement of new tracks. Dragging around and shoving existing tracks is separate, and still has issues with rounded corners.
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Wow, this is a very cool feature, thanks a lot, it will save me a lot of work 
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For Windows users:
KiCad has renamed its System variables in use for nightly builds that will carry into KiCad 6. This has become necessary to allow concurrent versions of KiCad to more easily co-exist on platforms in the future.
Windows Installer Change
The Windows installer for new KiCad nightly builds from today onwards will now install into a versioned path.
Previously, KiCad would be installed into
C:\Program Files\KiCad\Now KiCad nightly will install into
C:\Program Files\KiCad\5.99\
No more excuses for not installing 5.99 and testing it!
EDIT: There’s some problem in the latest nightly build installer ATM, see the linked thread. I suggest avoiding it until it’s fixed.
EDITEDIT: The latest nightly build works.
EDITEDITEDIT: I added instructions for easy safe installation procedure unless you want to wait for the official instructions. Just start from scratch. Because we are talking about nightly builds for testing, it may not be worth trying to keep old settings. (4th edit: read the post linked to below if you use 3D models.)
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And another from marekr:
Important notice to those who use JLCPCB: Apologies from atommann (an engineer from JLCPCB), about Gerber X2 files at JLCPCB. At the moment they are not able to handle gerber X2 / aperture macro combination properly in gerber files.
The working solution for 5.99 until JLCPCB gerber processing is changed
This change is relatively new in 5.99. It is possible that there are other manufacturers who have problems with gerber X2 + aperture macro combination.
EDIT: It’s not necessarily the combination of these two, but JLCPCB has had some problems with X2, and now has with the new aperture macros produced by KiCad even though aperture macro itself is an old feature of X1. In any case disabling both should always work.
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This comes a bit late, but for those who use python plugins:
-
Because of KiCad code API changes v5 plugins don’t necessarily work with 5.99 (or later v6). It depends on each plugin developer how they handle this. For example Interactive HTML BOM by @qu1ck has been updated in git master but some other plugins don’t work as of now.
-
The plugin search path has changed. The safest way to add plugins for 5.99 is probably to use
<user configuration dir>/scripting/plugins/, i.e.
-
~/.config/kicad/5.99/scripting/plugins/on Linux -
%appdata%\kicad\5.99\scripting\plugins\on Windows -
~/Library/Preferences/kicad/5.99/scripting/plugins/on Mac (untested by me).
(EDIT: see Post-v5 new features and development news below)
- Python console may not work, see [SOLVED] Kicad Nightly "unable to create the Python console" etc. (Maybe I should recompile KiCad from scratch because this still doesn’t work automatically for me. EDIT: yes, rebuilding from scratch works.)
Qu1ck has also added some helpful buttons into the plugins Preferences section, see https://gitlab.com/kicad/code/kicad/-/merge_requests/561.
Arc track / Curved track interactive resizing has made it into v6 as part of MR 608. This should trickle into the nightlies over the next few days.
Notes:
- Does not do anything on 180 degree arc tracks.
- Does not do any on-line DRC checks as this is not part of the router at the moment.
- The resizing operation is started as part of a “drag” action (either “45 degree” or “free”). This means:
- You can press ‘G’ or ‘D’ on the keyboard to start the process.
- You can also just click and drag to resize, but this is dependent on your Preferences settings (see Preferences->Mouse and Touchpad->Drag Gestures)
- Make sure you have only one arc track selected and nothing else, or you will start the in-line dragger (part of the router tool).
See below video for demo:
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Awesome! thanks for highlighting this
KiCad will now use C:\Users<username>\Documents\KiCad\5.99\scripting\plugins as the preferred location to load plugins.
%APPDATA%\kicad\scripting\plugins still works for now.
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