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by xellisx 2240 days ago
I wish they had git or something built into KiCad, specially to update parts and be able to find libraries, instead having to search for them online and downloading and extracting and adding to two places in the software.
2 comments

They sort of do, the official KiCAD part libraries are actually hosted on Github https://kicad.github.io/. A lot of distributions kinda mess this up by distributing static snapshots, but I usually clone the Git repo and then direct KiCAD to that. The base libraries cover a ton of parts, and I then keep all my self-drawn or individually downloaded parts in a separate library.

It's still a pretty clunky workflow but it gets the job done. I really wish it was possible to have a point and click interface in the GUI for downloading individual new parts akin to a Linux package manager, but this is probably difficult to manage since there is no centralized distribution point for parts that are outside of the official libraries.

This is my biggest gripe with KiCAD. No matter what I do, my libraries end up messy.
Another thing I wish they had. something to help pick the right sizes, for stuff like capacitors.