LibrePCB 2.1.0 Released | LibrePCB Blog

Hi! I,<br>@ubruhin,<br>am now working full-time on LibrePCB. Please support me with a<br>donation to fund the long-term development. Thanks!

Donate

LibrePCB 2.1.0 Released

Blog

Subscribe

@ubruhin

May 19, 2026

Today we released LibrePCB 2.1.0, bringing cross-probing, UI themes,<br>3D shading, a new project library manager, automatic library updates, and many<br>more improvements! Check out the highlights and the full changelog below.

Highlights

Cross-Probing & Net Highlighting (#1748, #1790)

LibrePCB now supports automatic, bidirectional cross-probing between schematics<br>and boards. Whenever you select components, nets, pins or pads in one editor,<br>the corresponding objects are highlighted in the other one, while unrelated<br>objects are dimmed out. In addition, it is now possible to search for nets in<br>schematics and boards — using the same dimming for unrelated objects — making<br>it even easier to inspect and navigate complex designs!

Your browser does not support the video tag.

Themes & Color Schemes (#1731, #1760)

As LibrePCB 2.0 was the first release with our new UI framework Slint, we<br>had to focus on implementing all the basic functionality and thus keeping the UI<br>simple. Therefore we made the decision to initially provide only a dark theme<br>(which was not even a very nice one). Now we finally invested more time into<br>the UI theming, resulting in an improved dark theme and a new light theme.<br>The theme is automatically chosen according to your system theme, but of course<br>you can manually override it in the workspace settings.

The colors of 2D canvases (i.e. schematics, boards etc.) remain independent<br>of the UI theme to allow configuring them individually. However, the<br>configuration of those colors has been reworked as well and now comes with<br>several built-in color schemes. For example the dark theme experience can now<br>be improved by simply choosing a dark schematic color scheme. In addition,<br>it is now much easier to create custom color schemes since any color<br>modifications are instantly applied to the opened editors.

Your browser does not support the video tag.

2D Board Flip & 3D Shading (#1709, #1764)

The board editor now allows flipping the 2D canvas upside-down to view the<br>board from the bottom instead of "looking through" the board from the top. This<br>simplifies routing the bottom board side and avoids accidentally grabbing<br>objects on the top layer since not only the rendering is inverted, but also<br>the "hit test" on a click — when viewing the board from the bottom,<br>objects on the bottom layer are stacked above objects on the top layer.

Another enhancement regarding visualization is the 3D viewer, which now applies<br>shading to the surface of the PCB and the 3D models. A small change, but still<br>very useful since it finally makes edges and holes of 3D models visible<br>and generally leads to a much more realistic rendering.

Project Library Manager (#1788)

This release introduces a new Project Library Manager to give you a clearer<br>overview of the library elements bundled in a project. It lists all bundled<br>elements, shows which workspace library they come from, and compares their<br>bundled and latest versions.

If library elements are not found in any workspace library, you can now save<br>them from the project directly into a workspace library. This is especially<br>useful for projects you received from someone else or migrated from EAGLE.

The old Project Library Updater is still used to update the project library<br>elements, but the goal is to also integrate this functionality into the new<br>library manager in a future release.

Device Editor Improvements (#1780, #1768, #1769, #1772)

The device editor gained some new features to increase productivity:

The dependent package and component can be clicked to open them in a new tab

The pinout is now visualized in the component preview, simplifying its review

The previews can be zoomed & panned to inspect them in detail

A measure tool allows you to verify whether the selected package really has<br>the desired dimensions

Add Planes at Lightning Speed (#1745)

Another small but useful productivity improvement has been implemented for the<br>board editor. Adding copper planes is a very common task, while usually they<br>span just the whole board, thus it seems unnecessary to draw their outline<br>manually. For this typical case, planes can therefore now be added with a<br>single click — which also automatically selects the next lower layer, so you<br>can just continue clicking for each layer. After reaching the bottom layer,<br>the tool exits automatically.

Your browser does not support the video tag.

Automatic Library Updates (#1776)

So far, the libraries installed through the library manager had to be kept<br>up to date by installing the updates manually. However, this was unnecessarily<br>cumbersome — since those libraries are installed read-only, there is no harm<br>in letting LibrePCB update those libraries automatically, so LibrePCB 2.1 will<br>do this now...