Windows Open With Menu - All Read KiCad 7.0

[Billy_B]

Does anyone Else have this problem?

I am running Windows 11, and have installed KiCad 5.0, 6.0, and 7.0.
When I right click on a file the open with menu reads KiCad 7.0 for all 3 versions of the KiCad file.

In the End I had to delete the Registry settings for:
“Computer\HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Applications\kicad.exe”
“Computer\HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Applications\eeschema.exe”
“Computer\HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Applications\pcbnew.exe”
“Computer\HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Applications\gerbview.exe”

[poco]

Had something like that when transitioned from V5 to V6, or maybe from V6 to V6.99. App icons were swapped also (thought launching V6 but V5 was launched, something like that). Do not remember exactly, but all this was related to “open with” windows functionality, got rid of V5 solved the issue.

[straubm]

Same for me. I have 6.0.x, 7.0.0 and 7.99 in parallel and it was all 7.99. Deleting said registry keys solved the issue. Now the context menu offers 6.0.10, 7.0 and 7.99 all right.

[Billy_B]

I realized that running kicad from command prompt only runs Kicad 7.0.

I Found that adding symlinks in the bin directory of each install makes it so I can run kicad6 or kicad7 to run the desired kicad version

mklink .\kicad6.exe .\kicad.exe
mklink .\eeschema6.exe .\eeschema.exe
mklink .\gerbview6.exe .\gerbview.exe
mklink .\pcbnew6.exe .\pcbnew.exe

mklink .\kicad7.exe .\kicad.exe
mklink .\kicad-cli7.exe .\kicad-cli.exe
mklink .\eeschema7.exe .\eeschema.exe
mklink .\gerbview7.exe .\gerbview.exe
mklink .\pcbnew7.exe .\pcbnew.exe

The Path Environment variable needs to have paths to both of the KiCad bin directories.
Restart is required to update the Environment variable

Update

I got tired of making these changes manually so I created a power shell script
Use at your own risk.

reg delete HKCR\Applications\kicad.exe
reg delete HKCR\Applications\eeschema.exe
reg delete HKCR\Applications\pcbnew.exe
reg delete HKCR\Applications\gerbview.exe

# change to the users install directory
cd "C:\Program Files\KiCad\7.0\bin\"
New-Item -ItemType SymbolicLink -Path .\kicad.exe       -Target .\kicad7.exe    
New-Item -ItemType SymbolicLink -Path .\kicad-cli.exe   -Target .\kicad-cli7.exe
New-Item -ItemType SymbolicLink -Path .\eeschema.exe    -Target .\eeschema7.exe 
New-Item -ItemType SymbolicLink -Path .\gerbview.exe    -Target .\gerbview7.exe 
New-Item -ItemType SymbolicLink -Path .\pcbnew.exe      -Target .\pcbnew7.exe