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Comment by theon144 | Hacker News Reader

>Electrical engineers are willing to put up with so much more it seems.

In general, IMHO. EAGLE, a golden-standard proprietary EDA tool, while still being quite a bit ahead of KiCad on the UX front, features no fewer pitfalls and completely unintuitive controls.

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YMMV. I started learning on Eagle and switched to Kicad. It's correct that library handling and pcbnew/eeschema interaction is a little weird, but just for laying out things I always found Eagle's user interface to be obtuse and idiosyncratic, whereas Kicad was quite natural in comparison.

The elephant in the room is back annotation. No one who has used EAGLE professionally will (or at least should) ever be happy with a package that doesn't keep the PCB and schematic synchronized automatically without user assistance or interaction.

I've heard the KiCAD people are working towards this goal. If they pull it off, it'll be a game-changer. I'm definitely rooting for them.

I had a similar experience, but I’m skeptical that it’s because KiCAD is wildly “better”. In the interim, I’d learned more (this is “just” a hobby) and the second tool tried benefited from that learning and Chris G’s excellent “getting to Blinky” video series because YouTube was now really a thing.

Describing KiCAD’s UI as “quite natural” could only be true with the “in comparison” qualifier, IMO.

I still do not understand how EAGLE attained its 'golden-standard' status. Out of the cheap or OSS EDA tools (DipTrace, g-EDA, KiCAD, Eagle)* I thought it had the most difficult learning curve. My best assumption is that it is riding on historical momentum.

* Although not really in the list, last year Cadence was selling OrCAD for something like $430. Hopefully we get more < $500 USD offerings.

I possess a license of this OrCAD, it is exremely limiting (in terms of Constrains at least). KiCAD is even more feature rich in this case, and free. :-)

> golden standard?

In what way? I've never heard of anyone doing "serious" (like sense FPGA routing etc.) In eagle

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