Requirement for Kicad project directory name?

Schematic
1

In Kicad 6, the File > New Project… function opens a file dialog, and after you’ve navigated to a directory, and entered a new name, Kicad 6 proceeds to create both a new directory with the supplied name, and inside that a project file with the supplied name.

Does Kicad 6 actually have a requirement for a project to have a containing directory with a name that matches the project file name?

I have tried using Kicad 6 after moving the project files to a different directory, and it seems to work fine, but am I missing something? This link:

… doesn’t mention anything about the containing folder name.

2

No it’s not a requirement, just the default. I have created modified versions of projects by making a copy of the directory contents in another directory outside of KiCad. The project files retain the original names and work fine.

3

As I mentioned, I too have tried just changing the containing directory name or location, and Kicad seemed to work OK. I just don’t know if there’s some operation that I haven’t tried yet that might fail.

4

I strongly doubt if there will be any adverse effect. The directory is part of the path which can be anything. The KiCad applications work off the project file.

Supporting evidence is that it is possible to have more than one project in a directory, you just need to open the relevant project file.

The only glitch that might happen is if you rename the directory from under KiCad, its entry in the recently used list will be invalid and you have to Open Project rather than Open Recent Project.

1 Like
5

Your multiple projects comments do add some confidence to the assumption that the containing folder name doesn’t matter. Thanks.

6

In V5 there were files with the same name for all projects (fp-info-cache). I’m not sure if V6 is 100% free from something like that.

7

It’s a cache of footprints from the library so safe to use by all projects. There were suggestions sometime back about relocating this to a common directory. Anyway I delete this file whenever I like, it only slows things a little next startup.

8

Because KiCad does not know the answer to “which files are part of this project” other than looking for files that are next to (in the same directory as) a kicad_pro file, the other impact of putting multiple projects in one directory is that the automatic project backup will create backups of everything in the directory.

1 Like
9

Presumably someone who does this has a use case it suits. I haven’t myself. One might be a group of PCB projects similar, using common subsheets but the main boards differ. They should not complain if the backup grabs everything.

10

This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.