[nicman23]

freecad with the new ui + its openscad integration is pretty good.

openscad in general is quite easy if you can functionally program

[exasperaited]

AFAIK FreeCAD's core OpenSCAD replacement is being suggested for replacement with an alternative so things may further improve.

OpenSCAD in a FreeCAD context does address many of the limitations of OpenSCAD, but it's not perfectly compatible.

[WillAdams]

That's a shame.

If I could use FreeCAD by programming in OpenSCAD, I'd be far more inclined to use it.

[exasperaited]

There is another workbench — indeed I think this is possibly a candidate to replace the core one:

https://github.com/KeithSloan/OpenSCAD_Alt_Import

There's also a CadQuery 2 workbench now: https://github.com/CadQuery/cadquery-freecad-workbench/

[WillAdams]

Thanks!

It's especially nice that CadQuery has come full circle (having started as a workbench).

[jandrese]

I find OpenSCAD to be decent, if somewhat tedious, when making mechanical parts but extremely limiting if you want to work with organic shapes. Even mechanical shapes that just avoid sharp edges require a fair bit of effort. One thing I do like about it is how it encourages users to parameterize their models just by the nature of the language. Pretty much everything I make in OpenSCAD has a list of named parameters at the top I can later tweak if I need to shrink or enlarge some aspect of it.