I am currently laying out footprints for a bunch of non-standard connectors and I was wondering if it was possible to make a ‘hole’ that I then reference on all the other footprints. Were the hole to not be sufficient for any reason, I could then update the “master” and then the other footprints with this master-footprint referenced would update themselves automatically (or easier than changing the properties for for all of them manually.)
These footprints have fewer than 20 holes each so it’s not that difficult or tedious to manually update them but it would be a great thing to know for future projects.
There’s no simple way to do it, unless you want to write a python script. But depending on how much manual work there is, you could even consider using a text editor and find/replace the values in the footprint files. Then update the footprints on the board.
It is not clear to me what you exactly want to reference and copy between your footprints.
All Kicad’s footprints are simple text based, and editable in a text editor, and I’ve used it to hack into KiCad’s files on several occasions. With a simple search and replace in a text editor you can easily do small modifications to a number of pads in a footprint.
If you have an interest in Python, then have a look at the footprint wizards scripts. It’s a collection of some 10+ python scripts for generating footprints, and one of them may be easily adaptable to generate your own footprint library.