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Comment by ENadyr | Hacker News Reader

Have been using KiCad for PCB development for my hardware startup and overall happy with the choice.

Yes, they have made questionable UX decisions in development but then I've not tried an EDA tool that got the UX right. For those considering KiCad, but struggling to do it by themselves, I suggest you either take a Udemy course to show you the user flow. Or better yet, buy some tuition (with beer or whatnot) from someone at the local hackspace or similar.

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I think "decisions" is too strong a word. The UI is heinously inconsistent, and feels like a bunch of similar tools were crowbarred into a box and called an application. It's usable once you pick a semi-coherent subset of features and then ignore the rest, but it takes a lot of trial and error to figure that out.

Available features and even hotkeys change depending on what 'rendering engine' you choose? What? Not to mention that the interface conventions between parts editor, schematic editor, footprint editor, and layout editor vary significantly for no good reason.

I agree 100%. That said, have you used Orcad? When I use it, it also "feels like a bunch of similar tools were crowbarred into a box and called an application". From what I heard, the reason for that is that different tools where actually bought up and bundled together.

EDA tools are terrible across the board; I wonder why that is the case.

I think the problem is that it's rare to find skilled software developers who are also skilled hardware designers (at the professional level, a lot of hobbyists do both). So you don't get much quality dogfooding going on. Either the tools are developed by hardware engineers, and the workflow is efficient but the software is slow and buggy and the UI is inconsistent, or they're developed by software engineers, and so it technically does what you need but the workflow is terrible.

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