Arduino IDE supports huge amount of devices for developing. However, when you install ESP32 and ESP8266 board package, menu list will be horrible.

It is annoying when you reselect ESP8266 board and see all Upload Speed, memory size, etc falls back to default.

Board information are stored in boards.txt file. You can edit this file to hide items you don’t want to see.

Default boards.txt for Arduino is stored under

C:\Program Files (x86)\Arduino\hardware\arduino\avr

ESP type files are

C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Arduino15\packages\esp8266\hardware\esp8266\2.4.2
C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Arduino15\packages\esp32\hardware\esp32\1.0.4
C:\Users\username\Documents\Arduino\hardware\espressif\esp32

or something similar. File is in text format, and you see line like below.

##############################################################
esp8285.name=Generic ESP8285 Module
esp8285.build.board=ESP8266_ESP01
esp8285.upload.tool=esptool
esp8285.upload.maximum_data_size=81920

To hide specific board, comment out all line with #, or add line with board id + “.hide = true” option.

For example, esp8285 will be

esp8285.hide=true

However, it takes time to edit and it gets reset when you update board package.

So, I’ve made simple tool to set which item to show (for Windows). Please use at your own risk.

Run software, drag and drop boards.txt file.

Board and related items will be loaded. Check / Uncheck items you want in menu.

You can’t directly edit boards.txt for arduino in programfiles; copy to desktop, edit, and put back.

Restart Arduino IDE and you’ll get nice and clean board lists.

It seems like default items is selected from first one in menu, so if you want to change default item in menu to be selected, edit boards.txt and change order.

If you bring 921600 baud rate for Upload Speed in ESP8266 upper than other item, 921600 will be selected as default when you select ESP8266 board.