kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Brian Sidebotham <brian.sidebotham@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Guys,

I was recently thinking it would be cool to implement a templating
system for KiCad projects. This means including more than just a
project file as the basis of a new project.

Particularly for people doing Arduino projects and the like, it would
be very handy to be able to select a template when starting a new
project as a kickstart. The template would be able to consist of any
file type, so could include various schematic files, and a board file.
To make it universal, I think it would be good to include several
templates with the KiCad install, but also have a search path (or
environmental variable pointing to a path) for user templates.

I see a template as a simple directory of files. It need not be any
more complicated than that. It would be easy to implement, and if the
default project (which now only consists of a project file) were to
also include a schematic and board file, then any issue of a modal nag
box would be eradicated anyway.

It should be a simple directory wildcard copy and rename. All we would
need to do is define a template structure which could consist of a
simple text file to provide a description of the template, perhaps
possibly with a few images. These description and image files would
not need to be copied to the new project directory so there would need
to be a defined structure and/or naming convention for the template
files.

Does this sound like a valid proposal? I'd like to add this to the
project, so if it feels like a good direction to move in, we can
hammer out the details for a templating system.

Best Regards,

Brian.