I have a number of board types that I am experimenting with just for fun. They include the Uno, Nano, ESP8266, Nano 33 IOT and and ESP32. When setting or changing the board type in the IDE it becomes a pain scrolling through the long list of installed boards in the various sections to choose the required board
A little bit of experimentation has allowed me to move the boards that I have to the top of the sections in which they are located and I have contemplated removing all of the board types that I do not have from the boards.txt files but a more elegant solution would be to create my own custom boards.txt file containing only the boards that I have and have it at the top of the devices displayed in the lists of boards.
Some questions :
Where is the list of boards.txt files to be loaded held in the Arduino environment ?
Where is the section heading of the list of boards, such as "Arduino AVR Boards" taken from ?
Copying entries between unrelated boards.txt files such as from the avr file to the
ESP8266 file prevents compilation under some circumstances failing because Arduino.h is "missing". I suspect that this has to do with the associated platforms.txt files but I have not got to the bottom of it
Any help, suggestions, warnings ?
I have (of course) saved the originals of the boards.txt files so I can revert to the originals and I am aware that when new board definitions are loaded then any custom list of boards that I have created will be out of date
I did find this boards.txt editor but it has not been worked on for some time so is probably unsafe to use