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Comment by karotte | Hacker News Reader

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karotte·

pro Horizon:

- library management that makes sense (though is a bit more complex than KiCad's)

- clean and modern UI

- fast-paced development (if there's a suggestion, that makes sense to me, I'll implement it)

pro KiCad:

- large library of parts

- has been around for a long time, so for every problem you may encounter, there's likely a forum post or so that describes a solution/workaround

- larger community

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I wish they had git or something built into KiCad, specially to update parts and be able to find libraries, instead having to search for them online and downloading and extracting and adding to two places in the software.

This is my biggest gripe with KiCAD. No matter what I do, my libraries end up messy.

Another thing I wish they had. something to help pick the right sizes, for stuff like capacitors.

They sort of do, the official KiCAD part libraries are actually hosted on Github https://kicad.github.io/. A lot of distributions kinda mess this up by distributing static snapshots, but I usually clone the Git repo and then direct KiCAD to that. The base libraries cover a ton of parts, and I then keep all my self-drawn or individually downloaded parts in a separate library.

It's still a pretty clunky workflow but it gets the job done. I really wish it was possible to have a point and click interface in the GUI for downloading individual new parts akin to a Linux package manager, but this is probably difficult to manage since there is no centralized distribution point for parts that are outside of the official libraries.

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