this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2025
39 points (100.0% liked)
Opensource
2294 readers
57 users here now
A community for discussion about open source software! Ask questions, share knowledge, share news, or post interesting stuff related to it!
⠀
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I've been using it as my only EDA the last three years or so, and I can tell you it is much better than it was eleven-ish years go, and each major version has been better than the last. I have some plugins that have been broken for a couple major versions if I recall, which kind of sucks. Some functions still aren't offered - thus the plugins. I make extensive use of the 3D models, and often export to FreeCAD for enclosure design. FreeCAD's UX is worse than KiCAD's UX.
Freecad 1.0+ is a significant improvement on the ux front but the ui and workflow still need work
I agree, I tried FreeCAD a couple of years ago and it was unusable. I tried 1.0 and it was actually decent. Not amazing but definitely usable.
IIRC when you dragged a component in the schematic view all of the wires would get left behind. Have they fixed face-palms like that?
I think there's a different hotkey for that, maybe G. M doesn't bring your wires. I don't use click-dragging, so I'm not sure. It's also been about two months since I've worked in KiCAD
I would consider it still horribly broken if you have to use a special hotkey to get sane behaviour.
I don't agree that dragging keeping wires is sane behavior. There may be preferences to modify. I like the hotkeys because it's much faster than context menus. I'm also the type to use AutoCAD commands for everything instead of the ribbon.
The biggest issue years ago was selecting footprints after schematic design before board layout. Now you can choose from a drop-down as you draw your schematic.
Well... I'm afraid you're wrong about that. It's the behaviour almost all users expect, it's the most useful behaviour, and it's the behaviour of virtually all software that has wire-like interfaces.
Can you imagine if all the nodes in Blender disconnected every time you moved them? Ridiculous.