Installing and Upgrading KiCad

Importing settings

Each major release of KiCad has its own configuration, so that you may run multiple KiCad versions on the same computer without the configurations interfering. The first time you run a new version of KiCad, you will be asked how to initialize the settings:

If a previous version of KiCad is detected, you will have the option to import the settings from that version. The location of the previous configuration files is detected automatically, but you may override it to choose another location if desired.

By default, the schematic symbol and footprint library tables from the previous version of KiCad will also be imported. If you would like to start with no library configuration, uncheck the Import library configuration from previous version checkbox.

You may also choose to start with default settings if you do not want to import settings from a previous version.

KiCad stores the settings files in a folder inside your user directory. Each KiCad version will store its settings in a subfolder of that folder (except for KiCad 5.1 and earlier, which did not use subfolders). Those folders are:

Migrating files from previous versions

Modern versions of KiCad can open files created in earlier versions, but can only write files in the latest formats. This means that in general, there are no special steps to migrate files from a previous version besides opening the files. In some cases, the file extension for a file has changed from one KiCad version to the next. After opening these files, they will be saved in the new format with the new file extension. The old files will not be deleted automatically.

In general, files created or modified by one version of KiCad cannot be opened by older versions of KiCad. For this reason, it is important to keep backup copies of your projects when testing a new KiCad release, until you are confident that you will not need to use the older KiCad version anymore.