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Comment by WillAdams | Hacker News Reader

The one thing which I need to see in FreeCAD to be successful with it is an interface option which doesn't require a multi-button mouse, but which will work with a trackpad, or better still a tablet and stylus --- I spend 5 days a week essentially chained to a desk using a mouse (sometimes a Trackpoint) and evenings/weekends I prefer to sit somewhere more relaxing than a desk and to use a different sort of pointer.

Dune 3D seemed quite promising, but very limited --- is there a set of options for the UI in FreeCAD which will create a similar interface?

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Check out the other mouse options. I learned FreeCAD 1.0 entirely on trackpad (Mac, no middle click).

Now, if the random crashing were fixed, that would make a real difference for me...

I use a mac trackpad too. In “Gesture” mode now.

That mode works OK on touchscreens, in the sense that any app with tiny buttons to click does. I have tried using a tablet with a pen but it is a heavily modal UI so it feels a little bit like old fashioned light pen territory, as much CAD does. Not like an iPad app; they need designing differently.

Quite a lot of progress on macOS FreeCAD crashes because they changed an exception handling strategy for exceptions outside the Qt loop, if I remember right. Some crashing in 1.1RC that is being fixed. In general it crashes a whole lot less than it did in 0.20, say. But if you can reproduce them, definitely report them.

I didn’t like Dune3D; its interface is clumsy even if the 3D constraints thing is interesting.

(Which is not to say that I am not pleased to see more open source CAD packages taking different approaches. Dune3D is interesting, Blobfish's Cadseer is very interesting to a coder I'd have thought, and SALOME has obvious value)

The one small tweak I would suggest for FreeCAD is to use the tab bar workbench selector rather than the dropdown version. It’s such a small change but it helps flow between things in a way that feels like the various functions are more closely integrated. That, combined with custom panels if you want them, makes it more fluid.

(I am not making any particular claims for FreeCAD's usability; I do though think it is much better and much more learnable than the average HN perspective of it, which seems to often come across more as TUI-exceptionalism or "but I don't wannnnnaaa learn a guuuuuuuiiii". GUI CAD isn't intrinsically some inferior, imprecise, unformalised thing.)

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