Editor orientation

You have already driven both of KiCad’s main editors. In Chapter 2 you drew a complete schematic, and in Chapter 3 you turned it into a finished board. In this chapter, are going to slow down just enough to put names to the parts of each window of the two editors, so that when a later project says “open the Appearance panel” or “use the selection filter,” you know where to look and what it does.

Think of this chapter as a map, not a catalogue. I am not going to march you through every single button on every toolbar; that would be a wall of lookup material, and worse, it would go stale the moment KiCad changes an icon. Instead, I will show you the regions of each editor, explain what each one is for, and, most importantly, teach you how to find any tool quickly when you need it. The exhaustive, button-by-button detail already exists, and it is excellent. KiCad’s official documentation is thorough and kept current, and I will point you to it whenever you want to go deeper. Think of this chapter as the orientation that makes that reference easy to use, rather than a replacement for it.

Both editors are large, comprehensive CAD programs, and you will rarely need all of either one on a given day. The goal here is not to memorise anything. It is to make the windows feel familiar, so that nothing on screen is a mystery and you always know roughly where to reach. You will pick up the details by using them, exactly as you did on the tour.

Schematic editor essentials

The Schematic Editor is where every design begins, and it is the window you met first, in Chapter 2. Open it now if you would like to follow along: launch KiCad, open any project, and double-click its .kicad_sch file. Figure 7.1 shows the whole window with its regions labelled.

Figure 7.1: The Schematic Editor, with its main regions labelled.

Most of what you see matches the shared layout from the last section, so let me walk only the parts that are particular to drawing schematics (the numbers refer to the callouts in Figure 7.1). The right toolbar (3) is the one you reached for constantly on the tour. It holds the symbol tool, the power-symbol tool, the wire tool, the label tool, and the rest of the kit for building a circuit. The left toolbar (2) controls the display. Use it to set the grid, the measurement units, the cursor style, and the line-drawing mode that keeps your wires at tidy right angles. The Properties panel (6) shows the editable fields of whatever you have selected, so you can change a value without opening a separate dialogue. The Hierarchy Navigator (7) lists the sheets in your design; on a small single-sheet schematic like the blinker it has just one entry, but on a larger project it becomes the table of contents you click through to move between sheets.