KiCad power use: the most out of 8.0

My favorite kicad 8 enhancements and optimizations: all the tools and tweaks that keep me in flow and focused on design. I'll show my favorite bits related to net classes, grids, hotkey optimization and more.

This assumes you're already comfortable with Kicad and want to leverage all the bits to get peak performance out of it. If you're new to kicad, Phil's Lab has some great walk-through that cover everything from the start:

If you have an hacks, tricks or tweaks I haven't covered, please comment and let me know: I'm always eager to get better at this. Also let me know if any of the techniques shown were unclear!

If you think kicad is awesome and want to help make it even betterer, head to
and give them a hand :-D

[flantc]

I'm unreasonable happy about the power label being editable. This one of those things that brings me much joy but no one around me will understand my joy.

[ForgottenMachines]

Your overview style blows my mind, and someday, I can only hope to keep up with you...but I enjoyed it, so please, keep making these, and thank you!!!

[pirateradio]

I am so glad that I found your channel. Your presentation is so welcoming and you are covering topics of extreme interest to me, and doing so with tools that are functional in a Linux ecosystem.

[daviddickey]

In addition to the core content, I can say I also appreciated the factorio t-shirt and the "all your base" meme reference.

[SalvagedCircuitry]

Woah boy that was quick! I just read about kicad 8.0 yesterday and boy is is nice to see a walkthrough of the changes. I will probably upgrade from 7.10 later today. Thanks a ton!

[aliceitc]

I really like this video, useful and straight to the point! I browsed your other videos and they seem super interesting! If they are as good as this one, I would be really really glad that YouTube suggested me to come here. Might have discovered a treasure!

[sergioruppel]

Amazing, im just an average user of KiCad and seeing someone truly using it at this leves is amazing. I want to keep learning now.

[TheLomsor]

Amazing overview! Exactly what I was looking for since the release. Hard to come by such quality and relecancy on Youtube sometime.

[StevenHodder]

Super stoked about the improvements to the BOM/bulk edit :)

[heinzkreutziger]

You are very fast, so I had to view several times to understand. Beside from that fact your video is still fascinating. Thumbs up!

[L.Lagrange]

I have been using Eagle since KiCad 5. I just swapped back to Kicad 8 and could not be happier with the library improvements. I have yet to explore almost any of the other new features, and its already a huge improvement lol.

[JohnDoe-wbng]

And here comes my subscription to this channel. I love how quickly you are able to deliver the message.

[PsychogenicTechnologies]

These were my favorites, but there are more really neat goodies in there. I just discovered this:
Let me know if you find any others you think are awesome :)

[brianredbeard]

Killer video. I've been using the RCs for a hot minute but had missed a lot of these features. Thanks for the breakdown and looking forward towards the follow-up!

[riz]

Having this be the most prominent "KiCAD 8" video 24 hours after its release definitely helped me find it - while it didn't help me figure out why I'm suddenly having trouble with the footprint editor (a custom library isn't showing up even though I added it the same way in KiCAD 7 less than a week ago. EDIT: after restarting KiCAD, seems to work now), I was happy to see a well done tour of "new" things for 8. Your use of KiCAD is clearly more sophisticated than mine, so... subscribed! :)

[filipnevezi]

100% agree with spending time using keyboard shortcuts. The productivity gains from that are more than anything else you can do in sch/PCB design.

Great video!

[jacobm]

5:33 Ok, "They set us up the bomb!". That brought me way back.

[dymastro]

Thanks for sharing, looking forward to your walk trough.

[Clark-Mills]

Super summary blipvert, appreciated!; grab yourself a coffee! Thanks! :)

[IztokSustersic]

You deserve 3 Michelin stars for electronics. Thanks fo keeping us updated. Was just wondering whats new in KiCad 8.