Hacker News Reader

Comment by RobotToaster | Hacker News Reader

I've felt for a while this could be popular if it had a modern GUI.

From the documentation:

> BRL-CAD has an interactive geometry editor called MGED. It's often the starting point for beginners and allows creation and manipulation of models using commands. When mged is run, it creates 2 windows: a text console for commands and an interactive graphics window. Currently, if you close the graphics window, it quits the application.

You implement your design using BRL-CAD's DSL. It worked very well for a quite simple 3D model I implemented. Many (like me) prefer "coding" their designs instead of using an interactive, mouse-driven GUI.

OpenSCAD likewise is a great system for implementing "simple" models.

The issue comes when you want to take something simple and make it more... nuanced. Adding the chamfers, removing cruft from the design... it feels orders of magnitude harder than just using something purely visual.

>Many (like me) prefer "coding" their designs

Most "design" people don't, unfortunately. For better adoption it will need a modern CAD GUI.

That was brought up previously:

https://github.com/opencax/GSoC/issues/27

but didn't get any traction when discussing it here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32060838

though there was more in two previous mentionings:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21148247 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32449336

It's a program I've considered working with, but the lack of integrated CAM is something of a problem for my purposes.

If someone were to come to the project with an interest in integrating CAM features, they would not be turned away. Closest has been having someone implement a BRL-CAD-to-gcode converter, which was actually incredibly well-suited to solid modeling. Used ray tracing to perfectly sample and slice the layers.

That sounds interesting and workable for my needs.

Do you mean:

https://github.com/mbuesch/cnc/blob/master/tools/brlcad2gcod...

> I've felt for a while this could be popular if it had a modern GUI.

I gotta say, the screenshots showing what looks like Motif (or Lesstif) widgets makes it more appealing to me, not less.

I can actually tell apart the different widgets on screen, and determine what is a button and what is not.

The two main graphical applications, MGED and Archer, are both Tcl/Tk so what you're seeing is Tk. Newer GUI work in development is Qt-based.

Based on the screenshots, it looks like the GUI uses native OS widgets, which is IMHO a good thing.

Devs feel the same way. Modernizing the GUI has been years in development to get necessary infrastructure bits in place. Massive disruption with pandemic and migration to git, but GUI work is now back on top of the priority queue. Qt-based with other major library integrations.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com