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Comment by kitesay | Hacker News Reader

Spent hours and hours learning how to use it to draw a part. Got it done, but then didn't use it for a long time. Next time, couldn't remember how.

Finding Cadquery less of a hurdle for casual use. Wish I could run it from Termux though.

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I used it once or twice to open an existing .step file just to know if I was exporting it correctly from KiCad.

Speaking of KiCad, I am convincing lots of people to move from EAGLE to it now that EAGLE is about to be killed by AutoDesk, and everyone seem to be having a good time.

I am hoping FreeCAD can become good to the point I can convince people to move to it too.

KiCad is frustrating because it’s actually good enough to make a lot of models but it’s just unfriendly enough to make it take way too long to do… but it’s also still way easier than learning how to do it in a full-featured cad program.

I would kill for something like KiCad with more refined controls.

There's HorizonEDA. Just be prepared to spend a ridiculous amount of time setting parts up.

I can second Horizon EDA. It's not perfect, but it has the good KiCAD kernel without the abysmal UX.

FreeCAD may also be good - it's the only other one I haven't tried.

On the other hand if you're convincing EAGLE users to move they'll probably be happy with KiCAD because they're already used to an even worse UX, as if such a thing were possible.

I wish KiCad had a constraint solver built-in for defining footprints and placing some key parts of a PCB. A better library management system would also be nice. That aside, I think their interactive router is pretty great, and a huge improvement over older versions. I first tried KiCad in 2016 or 2017 and routing traces was pretty dire, especially if you had to redo them for whatever reason.

Got any specific pain points for KiCad?

Autodesk should have started their own ECAD from scratch. They have mountains of CAD know-how in house. Their acquisition of EAGLE did nobody any favors.

I am not sad to see it go. The only ones I know of who used to use EAGLE were those who got hooked on it when it was either free or the cheapest option for hobbyists and small businesses. It didn't win any UI/UX competitions, certainly not against the joy that is modern programs for solid CAD.

Traditional CAD software feels vaguely like programming -- it took a _lot_ of work to understand the fundamentals.

But once I did (on commercial software), switching to Freecad really wasn't that bad.

Cadquery looks interesting. In particular STEP support compared to OpenSCAD. Thanks for mentioning.

Try Build123d! It is just a joy to work with.

PythonSCAD recently gained STEP export:

https://pythonscad.org/

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