ocp-freecad-cam VS CQ-editor

OpenSCAD is my go-to. It's self-contained and AI coding tools know the syntax well enough to help you move fast. Unfortunately I keep hitting a complexity ceiling.

If it doesn't like how I'm describing something, it crashes. I have to load an older version of my .scad and try a new approach. This usually happens 70% of the way into a complex project, which is quite discouraging.

The Python ecosystem has CadQuery[0] and a few other tools built around the Open Cascade kernel[1] which is quite good in my limited experience. CadQuery is positioned as an OpenSCAD alternative [2], and I really want it to be. Unfortunately the user experience isn't there yet.

Making an object with CadQuery is writing a Python program. Which means you need a Python environment and dev setup. CQ-editor [3] is nice, but needs a Python environment first. I think CadQuery would be much more viable OpenSCAD alternative if it was packaged into a standalone CQ-editor application and published via homebrew, etc.

I'm also interest in Zoo [4](fka KittyCAD). They're trying to create a modelling tool that combines model-by-code and model-by-mouse. With some AI layered on top. They have an interesting architecture where they stream geometry to your local device from the cloud. Should be great for performance, but ties you to the cloud.

[0] https://github.com/CadQuery/cadquery

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Cascade_Technology

[2] https://cadquery.readthedocs.io/en/latest/intro.html#why-cad...

[3] https://github.com/CadQuery/CQ-editor

[4] https://zoo.dev/

I installed cadquery with cq-edit from github using the prebuilt package release for windows 10. This seemed to work great, cq-edit GUI launches and I can even model basic shapes. However when I try to run the printables file from above I get the error

There are other code-CAD derived tools but I recommend sticking to OpenSCAD at least for learning, for simplicity. There's also the seemingly great Cadquery that I haven't tried yet.

Use the latest version of cadquery. The version of cadquery that comes bundled with cq-editor binary isn't the most recent, and doesn't have support for cylinder.

CQ-Editor, download the prebuilt binary from the GitHub releases page https://github.com/CadQuery/CQ-editor

All this talk about anaconda etc is a little overblown. Just grab the release ZIP here and run the launcher. It drops you in the editor/debugger workspace with full functionality. https://github.com/CadQuery/CQ-editor/releases/tag/0.2 It doesn't appear to modify your system in any way.

I understand that other modes of using CadQuery require 'conda, but the basic built-in editor experience is self contained. Or am I misunderstanding something?

I tried this a couple of months ago, I found what it's trying to do very pleasant to use but the tooling around it is very annoying. The up-to-date version 2 isn't on pypi, conda is thoroughly unpleasant to have as an environment. There seems to be a drive to using it inside it's own editor https://github.com/CadQuery/CQ-editor while nice seems like wasted engineering effort in developing an editor when the language needs so much work. I didn't have much success structuring cad into modules as they wouldn't import well.

The point IMO of parametric cad in an existing language is to use the ecosystem. Lots of choices in this project make that really hard.

Anyways, I've just written that to make sure you know that the "code-CAD scene" or "state-of-the-art" is not OpenSCAD (and I'm not saying you don't know that), and that the ideas you had are really great, but they have already been brought to existence in CadQuery, CQ-Editor (the editor + visualization + debugging GUI for CadQuery), and the (still incipient) Semblage, that started to implement the "hybrid" approach of code-CAD + GUI based on CadQuery. I do believe another code-CAD program won't hurt at all, and there is even the possibility of collaboration between Fornjot and CadQuery and possibly Semblage, but I wouldn't say the world needs another code-CAD program. The world needs first to know about CadQuery and then decide its real needs. I've just read your blog post of your criteria for CAD software, and I really think that (apart from the community part, that requires that the project is known by many people, which seems to not be the case with CadQuery) CadQuery meets them nicely. If there is something I'm missing please let me know, specially if you already knew about CadQuery but it didn't suit your needs. Anyways, good luck with Fornjot!