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Comment by ur-whale | Hacker News Reader

> What do you mean by "the Blender treatment"?

On top of the other answers: a much more friendly UI. Blender used to have a horrendously steep learning curve because the UI was just alien and ignored most agree-upon convention used by other 2D and 3D packages.

Not the case anymore, Blender is much more user-friendly and beginner-friendly.

The huge amount on online video tutorial also helps tremendously.

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It was really not that bad, it just looked scary, once you got past the first steps, it was fine. But I guess those first steps made a big difference in adoption

What I tend to recommend folk do in the synth-diy community is to find existing designs like Yves Usson's yusynth stuff, and make a "cover version" of it. Draw the circuit diagram, and from that draw the PCB, trying to keep them as close as possible to the originals.

That way you're climbing the "using the tools" learning curve separately from the "laying out designs" learning curve, which makes it all a lot easier.

How would you go about making Kicad more "user friendly"?

A lot of small things, for example editing multiple parts at the same time (select multiple parts, E, change, lets say the value of multiple resistors, enter). Or how the power ports are horrible to use (you have to create a new symbol for each new net (these should really just be some sort of global label, with a power icon). Or a better, iso standard footprint generator. Being able to have multiple sheets open at the same time. Just small things like that. As for the UI, actually, just steal the blender UI concept, that modular window concept is great, though, if you define "user friendly" as, "The user immediately knows what to do when they open the program" idk what would help with that, it seems pretty on par with other pcb design tools in that aspect.

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