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Comment by fermienrico | Hacker News Reader

I found KiCAD extremely painful to use. Parts library is a mess and the developers are extremely uninterested in listening to people. I love open source projects and want to support them - KiCAD isn't one of them.

My life has changed since I discovered DipTrace. It is free for non-commercial use and extremely cheap for commercial use - About $100 would get you enough to build small-medium sized projects. And it is just so well engineered. Kudos!

Also, no subscription business. Just good ol' perpetual licenses. DipTrace developers are just amazing people - if you ask nicely, they'll give you a discount if you're a startup.

https://diptrace.com/

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As a former EE and PCB designer, you never use a vendor PCB library, especially one that shipped with your software.

From a software engineering standpoint, I realize this feels crazy, but its pretty much par for the course. Every organization develops their own libraries for parts and processes their vendors may use, and while there are standard size parts, there is enough variance that it doesn't really make sense.

"Re-implementing" the standard library is sadly par for the course.

Ofcourse, what I was referring to is the library manager itself. Finding parts (even in your own custom library) is horrible in KiCAD. UI/UX feels like it was developed my people with opposing opinions and finally mashed it all together. In any major software, you need a lead UI person that understands, listens, and responds to the community and integrates those changes in the main branch.

Yeah, library managers are not good. Across the entire industry.

If you've ever had a run in with a piece of software called Ultra Librarian you'd probably think highly of KiCad :)

I agree 100%. I've used computers all my life and work in IT, and I tried hard but couldn't work out how to use it. I finally gave up even though I'm still very keen to design my own PCBs.

I was planning to design my own ergonomic keyboard. I downloaded some library files for switches, etc, but it was just so painful to even find those switches in the library, I had no idea how to do anything.

I might give it a go again sometime, but it really was so bad I just gave up and let it go, hoping it would improve somewhat in future versions.

Agreed. I've brought a number of small to large-scale products to fruition using DipTrace. At the time I had a choice (more then several years ago now, I admit, so perhaps things had changed) KiCAD was a mess, while DipTrace just helped me get stuff done. The developers were always responsive to emails also. The cost of the license still leaves you many dollars ahead compared to other possibilities, taking into account time saved and mistakes with PCBs not made.

I'm no neutral party, and this is totally subjective, but KiCAD is way better than DipTrace.

When I tried KiCAD several years ago, I was drawn in by the extensive feature list only to find that it suffered from the same issues as Blender, another mayor open source project, it was mainly feature driven, and the UX was horrible. Enough at least for me as a hobbyist PCB layout software user to leave it be for a few years.

I'm kind of derailing here, but I strongly disagree about the Blender UX being horrible. After getting used to it, I find it one of the most usable pro tools. The command-based approach is IMO far superior than the usual approach of having tools and a toolbar you must switch. The windowing system is amazing and everything being scriptable is incredibly powerful.

I consider it somewhat similar to vim or CLI programs in general in that regard... It violates all conventions you are used to, but internally it is very consistent and well made.

I have heard all EDA UX's are horrible.

I'm just getting into PCB design as a hobby and I agree with the sentiment about KiCAD. I love open source, and I support open source, but KiCAD is a mess. I watched a half hour video they put out recently to try to understand why it's so bad, and I boil it down to these guys develop in a vacuum and they don't really understand HCI/interactive design. At all.

They understand PCB design, but they do not understand software design at all.

I wish Altium had a more accessible license for hobbyists because it's amazing. I'll have to check out DipTrace.

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