Good point, but it is late for me ;-). I keep a copy of the official libs in a personal directory and they are not installed in the default directory. The official libs are extremely useful as a starting point to make my own libs.
But even in that case you still want to separate different library sources. Otherwise it gets tricky to update a single source for example updating the official lib gets tricky if you have you personal libs mixed in the same directory no matter where the lib is located on the file system.
Sure, but my personal libs are not in the same directory as the official ones. The official ones don’t have an environment variable in my case.
As I have being using the kicad environment variables as personal variables, I will follow your advice the other way round: I will create personal variables for the official libs (that are not placed at the default location anyway).
The thing is KiCad comes with library tables that use the environment variables. These lib tables not only include the pointers to the official lib but also the description for every library. If you do not use the default path variable then you can not use the lib table and therefore will need to manually handle the official lib as well as losing the library descriptions.
Plus the official 3d model association depends on the KISYS3DMOD variable which means if you set that to some different place than the official 3d lib then you can not use the official footprints with their 3d models.
Edit: I split this from the original topic to avoid derailing it further.
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I’m thinking about moving my libraries to personal environment variables. It’s easy but boring. I’ll have to change the 3d variable inside every single footprint file. Maybe with a script. For the library table it won’t take too long.
The description of the libraries is not important to me. And I’m already managing the official libs manually. But your suggestion can be useful for new kicad installations.
Or use a powerful text editor like atom, vscode, …
all of these can search/replace in all files contained in a directory (even using regex if you want but i think for this task simple text replace is enough)
Thanks @Rene_Poschl. It was really fast and clean with sed
:~$ find ./ -type f -exec sed -i -e ‘s/KISYS3DMOD/new3dvariable/g’ {} \;
All footprints updated with one command. The fp-lib-table and sym-lib-table with a simple find/replace of a text editor.
Hi all – i finally have time to go back, follow this thread, and digest input. But it seems to be a new thread? How do I make the jump from my question" “how do I set the path to libraries” to this? TIA. Grant (I’ll now go see if i can find the original)
has this been answered?
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