The end of 2022 is here and quite some work has been accomplished on various parts of KiCad over the year.
We are all working to hopefully have a KiCad 7 release by the end of January 2023 but no promises!
This is a highlight of some (but not all) of the new features added since the last development highlight.
It has been two full months since the February development highlight went over the changes in January.
Here’s a fresh update on new features and changes that have happened to 6.99 nightlies. This isn’t a complete list as many changes come in smaller incremental changes that are hard to talk about.
It’s only been a month since the 6.0 release and work is well under way for the future 7.0 release with many features and improvements to come over the course of the year.
As a friendly reminder, nightlies are currently unstable, you can use them for testing and experimenting but we make no guarantees on the stability right now. Use them at your own risk, keep backups, especially if you are upgrading nightly versions.
The 3D Viewer has seen a few incremental improvements during the course of V6 development. Not all changes to KiCad have to large by themselves to improve KiCad.
As a preview of a feature available in the nighty builds, a large change was made to how KiCad stores and loads settings that not only fixes a few headaches with the old system but lays the groundwork for more customization in KiCad such as color themes. This was thanks to the work of Jon Evans in MR#68
Since KiCad 4.0, work has been progressing to overhaul all the various project file formats that among many benefits, make them far more human friendly, easier to parse and allow easier addition of new features.