Schematic+Symbol Editor Function and Display Problems 9.0

Schematic
1

I’m experiencing a very strange behavior when opening a schematic from the Project screen:

Clicking the “Place symbol” icon oddly loads and opens the symbol list (and loads the footprint list as well), and it looks like this:

kk
kk842×555 30.9 KB

Not nice. I get the same distorted text when opening the Symbol Editor from the Project page.

All my editors are set to “Fallback Graphics”.

I never saw anything like this in 8.0 (which works like a dream).

I suspect a bug, here’s my version info:

Application: KiCad x86_64 on x86_64

Version: 9.0.6-9.0.6~ubuntu24.04.1, release build

Libraries:
wxWidgets 3.2.4
FreeType 2.13.2
HarfBuzz 8.3.0
FontConfig 2.15.0
libcurl/8.5.0 OpenSSL/3.0.13 zlib/1.3 brotli/1.1.0 zstd/1.5.5 libidn2/2.3.7 libpsl/0.21.2 (+libidn2/2.3.7) libssh/0.10.6/openssl/zlib nghttp2/1.59.0 librtmp/2.3 OpenLDAP/2.6.7

Platform: Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS, 64 bit, Little endian, wxGTK, X11, LXQt, x11

Build Info:
Date: Oct 30 2025 16:53:42
wxWidgets: 3.2.4 (wchar_t,wx containers) GTK+ 3.24
Boost: 1.83.0
OCC: 7.6.3
Curl: 8.5.0
ngspice: 42
Compiler: GCC 13.3.0 with C++ ABI 1018
KICAD_IPC_API=ON

Locale:
Lang: en_DK
Enc: UTF-8
Num: 1.234,5
Encoded кΩ丈: D0BACEA9E4B888 (sys), D0BACEA9E4B888 (utf8)

2

I wonder if this is related to what I have been dealing with for the last couple of days. @ML9104’s screen shot looks a bit like “edit symbol fields”. When I try edit fields in that table:

  1. It is a constant fight to keep all of the columns on either one of my two monitors. Column widths tend to expand way bigger than desired, and the fields table covers more than one monitor.
  2. My typing (mostly in the datasheet field…I am putting company part numbers in there) shows up way to the left of the column, if I can do that at all. This would really require a video to adequately describe but I am not sure that I should be recording videos from my employer’s computer. Today in one instance (with several tries) I was not able to enter data in that column. I backed out of “edit symbol fields” and clicked on the symbol in the schematic to edit the field on that one instance. Then in “edit symbol fields” I was able to copy the field from that ref designation to the few other (instances = identical symbols.)

On that machine:

Application: KiCad Schematic Editor x64 on x64

Version: 9.0.5, release build

Libraries:
wxWidgets 3.2.8
FreeType 2.13.3
HarfBuzz 10.2.0
FontConfig 2.15.0
libcurl/8.13.0-DEV Schannel zlib/1.3.1

Platform: Windows 11 (build 26100), 64-bit edition, 64 bit, Little endian, wxMSW
OpenGL: Intel, Intel(R) RaptorLake-S Mobile Graphics Controller, 4.6.0 - Build 32.0.101.7077

Build Info:
Date: Oct 2 2025 13:29:53
wxWidgets: 3.2.8 (wchar_t,wx containers)
Boost: 1.88.0
OCC: 7.9.1
Curl: 8.13.0-DEV
ngspice: 45.2
Compiler: Visual C++ 1944 without C++ ABI
KICAD_IPC_API=ON

Locale:
Lang: en_US
Enc: UTF-8
Num: 1,234.5
Encoded кΩ丈: D0BACEA9E4B888 (sys), D0BACEA9E4B888 (utf8)

3

All is normal for me on 9.0.6 on Ubuntu and 9.0.6+Testing on Windows x64

4

This should be fixed since wxWidgets 3.2.7, see:

5

Well that leaves me stuck. Searching for wxWidgets upgrade only brings me source code to compile, which is outside my competence. Why doesn’t a KiCAD upgrade also upgrade wxWidgets?

6

Something is odd here. My Ubuntu 9.0.6 from the PPA is showing built with wxWidgets 3.2.4, this might be due to being on 24.04 LTS

Application: KiCad x86_64 on x86_64

Version: 9.0.6-9.0.6~ubuntu24.04.1, release build

Libraries:
wxWidgets 3.2.4
FreeType 2.13.2
HarfBuzz 8.3.0
FontConfig 2.15.0
libcurl/8.5.0 OpenSSL/3.0.13 zlib/1.3 brotli/1.1.0 zstd/1.5.5 libidn2/2.3.7 libpsl/0.21.2 (+libidn2/2.3.7) libssh/0.10.6/openssl/zlib nghttp2/1.59.0 librtmp/2.3 OpenLDAP/2.6.7

Platform: Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS, 64 bit, Little endian, wxGTK, X11, ubuntu, wayland

Build Info:
Date: Oct 30 2025 16:53:42
wxWidgets: 3.2.4 (wchar_t,wx containers) GTK+ 3.24
Boost: 1.83.0
OCC: 7.6.3
Curl: 8.5.0
ngspice: 42
Compiler: GCC 13.3.0 with C++ ABI 1018
KICAD_IPC_API=ON

Locale:
Lang: en_US
Enc: UTF-8
Num: 1,234.5
Encoded кΩ丈: D0BACEA9E4B888 (sys), D0BACEA9E4B888 (utf8)

7

Checking 9.0.6 on Windows and the latest 9.0.,6++ Testing, both are built on wxWidgets 3.2.8, so this is likely a Linux versioning quirk. But my Ubuntu 24.04 LTS still shows symbols as expected.

8

This is theme-and-font-dependent.

It should be possible to work around by putting something like:

* {
  -GtkTreeView-expander-size: 21;
}

into ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css

Or change your system font to one that uses less vertical space.

Another workaround is to use Flatpak.

9

Thanks All.

I’ve “bare metal” reinstalled my 24.04 LTS (there wasn’t much on the machine anyway) and will do a new 9.0.6 install tomorrow.

I’ll let you know how it works out.

Cheers.

10

OK.

After the reinstall, the same issue occurred, But after a couple of invocations of KiCAD with reboots in between, it’s gone now. That leads me to the hypothesis that something was wrong in my user configuration files (on a separate partition and not overwritten by the reinstall). The wxWidgets version is still the same (3.2.4) so that can’t be it.

It’s a mystery, but thanks for your feedback. All in all, KiCAD is top-quality software.