What is the size of active KiCad userbase?

[glenenglish]

I dunno. depends on the level of complexity, and what other software the staff have been exposed to- that strongly drives influence.
If you’ve used Altium and proficient, I suspect the productivity is almost 2:1 compared to KiCad. Mostly menu cascaded driven hotkeys and on-the-fly pushing onto the stack whatever you were doing … . Many of the operations in KiCad I need to stop whatever I am doing (IE placing a track, dragging or whatever) back to ‘idle’ and then change the preference parameter then restart whatever I was doing. You do this hundreds of times an hour in a complex design. In Altium, you can in the middle of anything start doing something else via the mouse or keyboard and whatever you were doing just gets pushed onto the stack. IE placing a track , then decode you want to delete some unrelated vias , done with that (ESC) then the trace continues placing from where you were at. It’s that sort of behaviour that screams productivity.

my whole life has been Protel / Altium. (since 1987) , I’ve always used the pro tools. The pro tools have not always been good though, there were a few bad Protel and Altium years in there where we held onto old versions for a few years. It was terrible.

Kicad I think, is very close to being a pro tool. Most of the enhancements that I think are required, are not complete rewrite problems, they are incremental enhancements. So it is close.
It’s only as good as the community that supports and writes for it, so I expect to be doing ‘my share’.

[BobZ]

@glenenglish

Mostly menu cascaded driven hotkeys and on-the-fly pushing onto the stack whatever you were doing … . Many of the operations in KiCad I need to stop whatever I am doing (IE placing a track, dragging or whatever) back to ‘idle’ and then change the preference parameter then restart whatever I was doing. You do this hundreds of times an hour in a complex design. In Altium, you can in the middle of anything start doing something else via the mouse or keyboard and whatever you were doing just gets pushed onto the stack. IE placing a track , then decode you want to delete some unrelated vias , done with that (ESC) then the trace continues placing from where you were at. It’s that sort of behaviour that screams productivity.

I have not used Altium, and your discussion above pretty much loses me. That is not your fault…

[glenenglish]

Bob I answered it here in a more appropriate thread, to avoid pollution

Display available shortcut keys by context

This is for BobZ’s question from another post but to avoid polution, I’ll put it in this post Bob mentioned he wasnt familiar with Altium’s stacked commands : (from ) BobZ, Maybe I can elaborate, getting a bit off topic. If you are placing a trace, maybe you are half way between your A and B, and suddently decide you want to place a via on the other side of the pcb, you can place-via (P V) and what you were doing goes onto the ’ stack ’ you go into place via mode , go and place as many vias…

[davidsrsb]

@BobZ

I sort of wonder how many corporate users we have

I have seen plenty in Malaysia. The exchange rate and local salaries make the commercial competition subscriptions very expensive.

[pedro]

I thought we were a few using KiCad is Spain due to the lack of messages in the Spanish forum. I was surprised at Kicon to see more companies using KiCad.

And there a lot of job opennings worldwide in Linkedin requiring KiCad competences.

[Piotr]

@glenenglish

my whole life has been Protel / Altium.

We, very small (family) company in 1997 have bought Protel 3. It was the most expensive investment in any tool in our entire history. Distributor (who probably had some Protel packs left to sell) didn’t told us that if we wait 3 months the Protel 98 will be available (Protel 3 had no pushing tracks, Protel 98 had). When then we said that they simply are not fair they said that only they can offer us is 20% discount for Protel 98. The effect would be that for the 180% od regular price we would have the up to date tool. We didn’t care that much about it and we simply didn’t have the money for it. Our decision was: never more anything from that company.
I was using Protel 3 till 2017 when I found that KiCad has pushing tracks feature.