Anyone have a recommendation for 2D drafting software? I’ve used LibreCAD a little bit and it’s fine. Any other options I should be aware of?
Anyone have a recommendation for 2D drafting software? I’ve used LibreCAD a little bit and it’s fine. Any other options I should be aware of?
FreeCAD and OpenSCAD are the two that I see mentioned with any frequency. I only have experience with 3D CAD, so I can’t give a ton of advice on how 2D CAD works in any software.
If you’re doing simple stuff, FreeCAD’s sketcher is pretty useful. It’s just not the best when you need to do a bunch of prints and large scale plan layouts. Autolisp is also a really slick system (with a ton of faults and disgusting quirks).
Anyone who’s used AutoCAD for a while gets used to Autolisp since literally every command is just a function call in the REPL, and you can write out procedures by just typing a short lisp routine out (or copy, pasting it from a text file like I’ve seen many drafters do).
FreeCAD has a lot of separate workbenches for different stuff, so I don’t know what OP’s “2D CAD” actually relates to, could be drawing a house or sheet metal. However, it does have a generic “drafting” workbench (that I have never used) that seems more 2D CAD oriented.
I’ve used it, and I wouldn’t really call it a replacement for AutoCAD. It can handle basic drafting, but the whole reason people want AutoCAD is because of the REPL. Drafting in AutoCAD kinda feels like drafting in Emacs.
If we are including OpenSCAD, I would also suggest cadquery and build123d, where you have the capabilities of the entire Python interpreter. I’ve been also interested in a couple of CAD kernel projects written in Rust: Fornjot (it looks like this was archived recently) / Truck
FreeCAD’s recent updates seemed to have fixed a lot of issues I have had with it. When I have free time, I have been practicing FreeCAD so I can start creating a part to 3D print for my desktop so I can fit all of the high capacity hard drives and maybe add supports to some areas.