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Comment by mountainriver | Hacker News Reader

FreeCAD is the worst. Thanks for building this!

(I seem to be cast in the role of FreeCAD advocate on HN these days, but here goes!)

For years I agreed with you - I tried FreeCAD multiple times, different versions, always sucked.

Then I watched this video [0] and discovered that v1.1 is different - and that it's good enough for solid reliable hobby usage. It's still a touch frustrating in a few areas (text, for example) but I've now switched over to it completely.

[0] https://youtu.be/VEfNRST_3x8

I agree. freeCAD has become a tool that I just use without thinking about it. Earlier versions always made me question my choice and try out other software.

I really, really want that to be true, but my experience trying to adopt it has been really painful.

Even selecting things in the UI has sucked. I went in and increased the selection radius or whatever, that helped. But really, should I need to do this as a new user?

Getting the constraints to behave is like pulling teeth.

It also kind of sucks that you have to have really sparse sketches that only contain one closed figure. I gather you can create a "master sketch" and selectively project geometry into other sketches. But the last few times I've tried the app, I haven't gotten far enough into my sketches before rage quitting to validate the technique.

Right now I am back F360 with their hobby license wanting to escape their regular messing with the terms and conditions.

> Even selecting things in the UI has sucked. I went in and increased the selection radius or whatever, that helped. But really, should I need to do this as a new user?

Agree - selection isn’t broken, but it’s definitely sometimes frustrating and as it’s such a common function, absolutely should be as close to perfect as possible. I think it’s partly that the visual indication of what you’re hovering over and would be selected is too subtle, and also I’ve found (on Mac; I’ve not confirmed on other OSs) that it’s not selecting what’s at the exact tip of the pointer, but is rather selecting a couple of pixels away.

> Getting the constraints to behave is like pulling teeth.

Huh, once I’ve actually selected correctly, I find the constraints are fine - say, 95% as good as Solidworks.

> It also kind of sucks that you have to have really sparse sketches that only contain one closed figure.

Can you explain what you mean by this? Do you mean you can’t have a sketch with (to take a very simple example) a circle inside a circle, or two unrelated circles, or something else?

There are situations I can think of where selection does seem broken by design. It's fairly easy to get into a situation in the 3d view where you want to select a vertex but because of the draw order it's very hard to find an orientation of the model that lets you put it "in front". So you spend ages selecting the lines around it, spinning the model, trying again from all sorts of angles. Heaven help you if you're trying to select a bunch of points that have this problem, it's frustrating as hell. The second is in sketches, where the constraint icons aren't selectable when they're grouped but will block the selection of a component underneath them anyway. That's just obnoxious. I think in both cases the UI is working as designed, but it makes for an unusable outcome.

Oh, and if the selection point isn't at the pointer point? That's just a bug, and needs to be fixed. I can't see any defending that.

I've forced myself to git gud with FreeCAD. It's better. Way better than it used to be. It's also still a very complex and user unfriendly application with a long road ahead of it.

You can make it work. You can also save yourself a lot of headache by using other CAD tools. Personally I value "Freedom" so I will continue to use it despite the difficulties but that may not be the right path for others.

I’ve tried FreeCAD multiple times, but I’m just too used to Rhino 3D. Unfortunately, it’s rather expensive. Anyone need a slightly used, low-mileage, one owner soul?

FWIW, I've been kind of kicking myself for being bamboozled into buying a Plasticity Studio license --- really, really wish I'd instead bought Moment of Inspiration 3D (which is by the lead developer of Rhino 3D).

Curious what folks think of MOI3D (and if there is any other similar CAD tool other than maybe Shapr3D).

Recent freecad is pretty decent. My main complaint these days is the performance of the geometry engine.

I found FreeCAD fine but it takes me a while to remember how to use it each time (since I don't use it frequently...)

FreeCAD would benefit from effective

(1) agile Product Management,

(2) Product Design & continuous user-research,

(3) Improvements to test-driven development (TDD),

(4) transparent & open outcome-based roadmap,

(5) a vision to make the application easy to use for newbies in a maker-space, and (this is specific to my use-case),

(6) Improvements to the CAM module to make it easy to use this for CNC routers, and designing objects with sloped/curved surfaces.

- FreeCAD site: https://www.freecad.org/

- FreeCAD code: https://github.com/FreeCAD/FreeCAD

- FreeCAD forum: https://forum.freecad.org/

To echo others' comments: FreeCAD has improved significantly since v1.0, so I'm hoping this attracts quality & stability-minded develeopers, and a frequent release cadence.

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