Hacker News Reader

Comment by _whiteCaps_ | Hacker News Reader

I see all of these complaints about the FreeCAD interface, but I learned it without knowing any other CAD software, so it seemed fine to me.

Maybe I'm just weird, I like the GIMP's UI too.

Highly recommend MangoJelly's tutorials if you're interested in learning it.

View on HN

I'm with you. I didn't have too many issues learning it. But I also didn't know other CAD software, so I'm sure that plays a big part for people; knowing what you want to do, but not being able to find it can be very frustrating, especially when what you want to do now requires an unfamiliar workflow that looks from the outside unnecessarily complicated. So I can understand people's dislike of the software.

I differ on recommending MangoJelly though; video can be good for learning CAD, but I got real tired of having to sit through a 15-40 minute video before getting to the point of what was being demonstrated. I would much prefer written tutorials or pages describing the specific feature I'm trying to use/learn. The FreeCAD wiki was more useful to me than MangoJelly's stuff and I hope people don't forget that it's there. But many folks like his approach, so do what works for you.

The attachment editor in FreeCAD is just terrible. Whenever you try to attach a sketch, the first thing you have to do is rotate it into the proper orientation.

There is also no visual preview of any of the operations and 99% of the action is manually entering numbers into the left pane instead of using visual tools to drag an extrusion, for example.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com