kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Lorenzo Marcantonio <l.marcantonio@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Sep 09, 2014 at 09:54:10PM +0100, Tim Hutt wrote:

> I've been looking for a good free EDA software for ages, and currently use
> Designspark PCB, which is freeware but not open source (although the only
> limitation is an unobtrusive RS splash advert on startup). It is ok though
> - and orders of magnitude better than Eagle. I tried gEDA years ago and it
> was worthless.

*How* do you survive with that toy of designspark? :P the wire drag in
schematic is fun however.

> Anyway, I've been following CERN's work on Kicad, and thought I'd give
> Kicad a try. These sorts of programs always seem to fail on basic usability
> things (like how to copy/paste) so I recorded my first ever Kicad session!

OK, there is a thing with CADs in general: *forget* the office usability
guidelines; CADs are optimized for workflow speed, not consistency with
common usability guidelines. So you need a little more time to learn
them but then you take a lot less time to do the work; they have put
toolbars and menus in autocad but it's not supposed to be used that way:
*everyone* go with the command line, it's fasted :D on the extremes look
at Blender, Maya and... vi (ok, that's not a CAD but the idea is the
same).

> It's 30 mins. Somewhat low quality youtube (it downscaled 1024p to 720p
> stupidly):

OK, I'll look at it.

> of the same crazy usability issues that seem to plague all EDA apps (failed
> the copy/paste test!), it did seem fairly clean and non-buggy and fixing

Copy/paste is rarely useful on a pcb (a little more on the schematic) so
it's low priority *and* however can't be a normal copy/paste anyway :D
The correct way to do it on eeschema for example is 'D'uplicate for
single parts and shift-drag for blocks. I agree, however, that area
could use some improvement.

-- 
Lorenzo Marcantonio
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