After many years of using Eagle, which was good many times, it’s now time to move on, Autodesk buying Cadsoft was not a good thing…
Why it was a bad thing? KiCad just got another user thanks to Autodesk
T.
Yeah that happened and now I’ve started getting used of it…
Using Kicad, Leaving Eagle, Autodesk buying Eagle or all three?
Autodesk’s policy regarding Eagle was probably one of the most important factors that caused the rapid increase in Kicad’s user base.
Eagle used to be the “go-to standard” for hobby projects and small businesses (that could not justify spending on Altium). That’s pretty good foundation for Kicad which is greater and greater with each release (and I’ve been using Kicad since BZR3xxx “Kicad3”).
Yes, getting used of using KiCad + leaving Eagle and also kind of the third one. But let’s hope after starting KiCad for real/in production, another company – why not Altium or Autodesk again – will not have to buy KiCad as it’s so good*/if you can’t beat them, buy them*… yes this has been a topic here before that this is impossible but is it really so?…
Theoretically possible in maybe two ways, but it would require too many 0.00000000000000001% chances at the same time to be taken even semi-seriously. It can happen only if multiverse is real, and even then it wouldn’t happen in this universe.
@eelik: I think you have miscalculated the probability by a factor of 10.
@TheSwede : I noticed that your amount of beginner-questions has decreased - a good sign that you are on the way to fully mastering the program:)
I’m waiting, then I will collect on KiCad’s double your money back satisfaction guarantee.
They would have to buy at least a substantial/consequential subset of the developers and hope it dies on the vine.
But, they really want the big buck guys and there are enough things Kicad cannot do that I don’t see this on the horizon anytime soon. Coding has become a big part of EE. I could see the large companies starting to aid development at some point. Maybe 10K in development saves you 90K in yearly license fees.
Yea, shortcut keys etc. starts to live better in the hands now etc… talking about shortcut keys, actually Autodesk (Inventor for example) offers some cool shortcut keys options, for example instead (or as a bonus) instead of a single hit of, for example “A”, it’s also possible to tailor your own double or triple keys like “AA” or “AAA” (instead of shift+alt+ctrrl+xxx" for another function which gives the application a better speed/flow, a good depth for more dimensions – not only that, also “AAAA” or “ASS” or “AAAASSSS” = fast simple one finger possibilities available if you like. That’s cool.
I like the idea of typing whole “words” or text strings as shortcuts. In the DOS age I had quite some practice with the commandline of autocad, which used a lot of 3 letter abbreviations. (I think a shortcut was “activated” by either a space or an [Enter]. How do those autodesk (they don’t get a capital “A” from me) distinguish between an “a” and an “aa” shorcut? Is there a timeout delay or somehting else?
They just make it possible and it works great. Try out, why not an Inventor 30 day trial, and you will see what I mean, it just works, and sorry for being “funny” with the looooong shortcut examples, but why not double hit a Key to get double as much shortcuts available? Once again, why not make it possible?
EDIT: I was wrong, it does not work with double keys in Autodesk software either. Example: if you choose “A” for one command and “AA” for another, the “AA” overrides the “A” instead of the opposite. Hm, this function may need timer function or something as you said " paulvdh"…
KiCads licensing and fully published code makes it really hard to buy over and close off.
Eagle was closed source freeware, so an easy target.
Does not work on my linux box, and I also bluntly refuse to even open an account with that company.
@RRPollack ??? What is that cartoon supposed to mean in this context? You could only got the idea of posting that by mis-interpreting what I wrote. Single key shorcuts would have to stay working of course, and I consider a “word” any combination of more then one ascii (or whatever it’s called these days) characters…
So how do you distinguish between an “a” shortcut and an “aa” shortuct?
Also note that something like this is already implemented with the u shortcut in the PCB editor, which progressively expands on a selection.
Just wanted to say I was a long time Eagle user, like 15 years. But after they got bought and got expensive, I switched to KiCad. Honestly it took me several weeks to get the hang of it all, but I’ve been very happy with KiCad for the last 2 years. I’m delaying the move to version 6 til more bugs get worked out.
Move on, be brave, it’s not that many bugs in there…
Altium is not very easy… and it’s slow as…