What is the best way to rename a project?

I have an existing kicad project that I’ve been working on, and when I first created the project I just gave it a working name, but now it’s time to formalize things a little so I would like to rename the project before I start doing commits to github. How should I go about doing that? Will it confuse kicad if I just rename the project folder, the .pro .sch .kicad_pcb files, etc? What about the project specific library folders beneath that (.pretty, and _library)? There does not seem to be a “save project as…” option anywhere that I can find, but maybe I’m missing it.

Thanks for any advice!

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You should just care about the names of the files KiCad knows about :

  • the .pro file
  • the top level .sch file, it must be named like the .pro
  • make sure that it you rename hierarchical sheet files you also change their symbols in their parent sheet
  • the .kicad_pcb file, it must be named like the .pro
  • your libraries shouldn’t change names if you don’t want to change each component

This might also interest you:

Before comitting anything, it is very useful to add a .gitignore template:

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I simple method is to rename a KiCad project is to resave the project with a new name using the top menu “File” → “Save As…” command or shortcut “Ctrl + Shift + S”. You can then erase the directory of the old project name.

This does not work if you have already committed code to your source repository.

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The KiCad of 2016 is not very much alike the the KiCad in 2023. A lot has changed in the mean time, including the Save project as directly from KiCad’s project manager.

So therefore I close this old thread (which is this forum’s policy).

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