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KiCad just drags stuff from very old days. The concept of having split tools for schematic and pcb just doesn’t cut it any more. Nowadays most companies have t

KiCad just drags stuff from very old days. The concept of having split tools for schematic and pcb just doesn’t cut it any more. Nowadays most companies have transitioned or are transitioning to do layout inhouse, because modern products are so integrated that the “old ways”, doing sch inhouse and sending it to a company for layout has become very cumbersome. IMO one of the key things for any new EDA package is making a wise choice on how to store their files. Being able to script stuff that works on your files is becoming a necessity, and packages like Altium can’t compete with that easily because they use binary files for the most important (sch and pcb). For me at least, storing info as textfiles is a must to consider a switch, because the biggest issue with Altium is how bad it interacts with tools like git.

convolvatron 6y ago
for small projects, this schematic/layout duality is really quite cumbersome. I really don't mind the warts in the layout section, there isn't that much to go wrong...but the parts management - making a crappy symbol, making a crappy footprint, making sure those are aligned...dealing with the ridiculous library notion. what a waste of time. but kicad at least has an approachable format. so I wrote some crappy tooling to at least generate symbol and layout from a single description. and I could theoretically write a front end and leverage things like Gerber generation. I don't understand why we don't have vendor supplied footprints in a tool-neutral textual format yet. I know people have tried - who are the contenders?