Just trying out this today for the first time, but this application seems to be tedious to use, looking at files copied, it shows many components that i cannot access in the program. screenshots show an example of many. It is also not obvious how to import new components into the list. the feature to connect to the web said I “couldn’t write to the directory selected” so I changed permissions on the directory and still could not do it, so selected a different directory. but the files copied from the web were the same as the program already installed… however there are items that have files for them that are not showing up in the list…see image for the files showing the .pretty folder for battery holders. then note there are no battery holders in the selection list.
The upper window shows pcb layout footprint files, the lower window schematic symbols.
Component libraries (footprints and symbols) have been one of the most confusing things in KiCad. The situation has improved for the upcoming version 5.0 and will improve more in the future. Meanwhile, for the version 4.0.7 you can read the Getting Started guide, https://kicad.org/help/getting-started/, and maybe the forum FAQ (link in the upper right corner).
For the version 4 series of kicad, it was decided to keep the list of automatically added symbols stable during its lifetime. This is why a lot of libs in the official library are not added automatically to every project. (The official lib got a lot of additions between the first release of kicad 4 and now.)
There is a topic that (towards the end) goes into detail of how to add all libs:
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