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> Kicad has pretty awful UX Interesting. I tried very much every EDA available on the market and Kicad has no contest. Easy to learn, doesn't get in the way an

> Kicad has pretty awful UX Interesting. I tried very much every EDA available on the market and Kicad has no contest. Easy to learn, doesn't get in the way and you can design boards in no time. Contrast with e.g. Altium. That one, in my opinion, is a prime example of awful UX. You have to constantly battle it to do anything.

IshKebab 1y ago
Well yeah just because the others are bad doesn't mean Kicad is good! I haven't tried Altium but I've used DesignSpark PCB, Horizon EDA, Eagle, Kicad and Geda. Geda is dead now but I remember it being basically worthless. Eagle seemed like it should be good but they've somehow screwed up every possible UX decision, sometimes in ways that I wouldn't have even thought of if I was trying. They somehow screwed up copy & paste! Look at this absolute insanity: https://youtu.be/XHwRnunzQUE?t=35 https://youtu.be/XHwRnunzQUE?t=35 I wonder what Tantacrul would say about that. DesignSpark PCB is actually quite good. It's free with no limits but not open source. Has quite a dated GUI and weird zooming but other than that the UX is one of the least WTF-y I've seen. Kicad is very powerful but the developers are clearly actively hostile to good UX. Horizon EDA is based on Kicad's engine but fixes the UX. It's quite good but it does have a slightly confusing component model, and I have found it to be kind of slow sometimes. I haven't tried LibrePCB yet - it does look quite good. Going to try it out for my next project.
- rcxdude 1y ago
  CAD software, in general, tends to have a bit of a historical baggage problem. The oldest software is _old_, so it has all kinds of UI quirks because there was basically no standard of how to design UIs. And it's an area where people build up a lot of muscle memory and get upset when it changes, so any given tool tends to basically keep the same decisions almost indefinitely (and users/devs will have all kinds of rationalisations about how it's actually better, not just what they've gotten used to). And then the newer CAD tools start by copying an old one (KiCAD is very obviously based on EAGLE) and then change a few things around, but not too much, so you still get something far away from a typical UI. There's basically nothing that starts from scratch, and for a lot of patterns there's no obvious 'standard' to implement, either (I feel this pain when swapping between 3D applications: how do I pan, rotate, or zoom? It always takes a while for me to figure it out again, because I don't think any two of the 10 or so applications I use do it exactly the same way, and realistically most of approaches are fine, it's just the variety that's the headache)
rcxdude 1y ago
Altium used to be the good option! It's still better than many of the more expensive alternatives, KiCAD has just caught up a hell of a lot.

IshKebab 1y ago

Well yeah just because the others are bad doesn't mean Kicad is good! I haven't tried Altium but I've used DesignSpark PCB, Horizon EDA, Eagle, Kicad and Geda. Geda is dead now but I remember it being basically worthless. Eagle seemed like it should be good but they've somehow screwed up every possible UX decision, sometimes in ways that I wouldn't have even thought of if I was trying. They somehow screwed up copy & paste! Look at this absolute insanity: https://youtu.be/XHwRnunzQUE?t=35 https://youtu.be/XHwRnunzQUE?t=35 I wonder what Tantacrul would say about that. DesignSpark PCB is actually quite good. It's free with no limits but not open source. Has quite a dated GUI and weird zooming but other than that the UX is one of the least WTF-y I've seen. Kicad is very powerful but the developers are clearly actively hostile to good UX. Horizon EDA is based on Kicad's engine but fixes the UX. It's quite good but it does have a slightly confusing component model, and I have found it to be kind of slow sometimes. I haven't tried LibrePCB yet - it does look quite good. Going to try it out for my next project.

rcxdude 1y ago
CAD software, in general, tends to have a bit of a historical baggage problem. The oldest software is _old_, so it has all kinds of UI quirks because there was basically no standard of how to design UIs. And it's an area where people build up a lot of muscle memory and get upset when it changes, so any given tool tends to basically keep the same decisions almost indefinitely (and users/devs will have all kinds of rationalisations about how it's actually better, not just what they've gotten used to). And then the newer CAD tools start by copying an old one (KiCAD is very obviously based on EAGLE) and then change a few things around, but not too much, so you still get something far away from a typical UI. There's basically nothing that starts from scratch, and for a lot of patterns there's no obvious 'standard' to implement, either (I feel this pain when swapping between 3D applications: how do I pan, rotate, or zoom? It always takes a while for me to figure it out again, because I don't think any two of the 10 or so applications I use do it exactly the same way, and realistically most of approaches are fine, it's just the variety that's the headache)

rcxdude 1y ago

Altium used to be the good option! It's still better than many of the more expensive alternatives, KiCAD has just caught up a hell of a lot.