[Qwertious]

Honestly, OpenSCAD has a great UI - it's everything else that sucks about it. OpenSCAD's core advantage is that if you can code, then it is so damn simple; cube sphere cylinder variables modules rotate translate (and if you want to be really fancy: hull union intersect difference), that's all you need for 99% of projects and it fights onto a half-page cheatsheet.

The problem with OpenSCAD is that it's fundamentally really dumb; it doesn't have constraints, you usually just create shapes additively but then you have awful Z-fighting because the engine sucks, and the solution is "just barf epsilons everywhere lol" (which is pure cope - that's not a solution, that's an awkward workaround that requires a bunch of pointless busywork (and more importantly, forces you to figure out stuff about your model that you legitimately don't care about) because the engine is incapable).

I would love to see a successor to OpenSCAD that keeps its IDE-style interface (and no, that doesn't mean using pycharm - the beauty of OpenSCAD is that you have a minimal functional DSL and the GUI is built around the DSL and its use-case) but finds an elegant method of integrating constraints, basically anything to do with curves, that sort of stuff.

[somat]

Openscad does have constraints, they just look different. It is an imperative ui so it has imperative constraints. Most cad programs have a declarative ui and declarative constraints.

However I have to admit, I too would love an imperative ui with declarative constraints. I have a hard time visualizing how that would work, but that is probably because I lack imagination.

[frmdstryr]

> I would love to see a successor to OpenSCAD

There is quite a few "code" CAD's around https://github.com/Irev-Dev/curated-code-cad. Cadquery has contraints but isn't really a DSL.

[CarVac]

I use OpenSCAD a lot, but am switching to Build123D because it's a lot more powerful and doesn't seem any harder.

No IDE though…