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Comment by phkahler | Hacker News Reader

>> I love solvespace, the UI is quick, minimal and easy to come up to speed with. I use it as a 2D parametric sketch pad, for 2D designs for laser cutting, making 3D models for kicad, and a few basic 3D printed fixtures, but it is in no way a replacement for even Freecad.

Solvespace maintainer here. I appreciate your assessment of Solvespace and feel it's accurate. My intent is to bring more capability to it while maintaining the feel of it which seems hard to quantify. I understand why people use FreeCAD - it's much more comprehensive. What's interesting is that you also use Solvespace because it's "better" in some way (and I agree). How would you describe that? What keeps you using it?

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Not the person you're replying to, but in my experience going from Fusion360 to a new program due to license changes, FreeCAD has a lot of "boilerplate work" you need to do in order to get to modelling, including understanding the toolbars you need, parts, etc. but in Solvespace it's pretty much just draw and constrain like in Fusion360. FreeCAD spits out cryptic errors in a big log at the bottom that's pretty useless, but Solvespace tells you exactly what's wrong (generally).

It is missing a few things, like selecting a face won't let me draw on that face, which it probably should allow since it technically knows all the information about that plane (face origin and normal). And Fusion360's inset tool is invaluable for making stepped features from existing complex geometry without having to redraw and constrain a whole new set of stuff. And also negative extrusion distances, which are basically a difference boolean operation, should probably be allowed for usability. But overall I'm very happy with Solvespace.

>> It is missing a few things, like selecting a face won't let me draw on that face

That's issue #423. https://github.com/solvespace/solvespace/issues/423

There isn't always enough information to create a new sketch plane, but often there is. It would probably be confusing to allow it on the sides of an extrusion but not the top and bottom. The changes needed to carry the extra information would break file compatibility, but I'd like to do a number of such changes all at once some day not soon.

>>FreeCAD spits out cryptic errors in a big log at the bottom that's pretty useless, but Solvespace tells you exactly what's wrong (generally)

I hadn't thought about error messages as a selling point, but I'll try to continue the trend of being informative.

I appreciate the work that's been put it, I think it's one of the better parametric CAD modellers I've tried.

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