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AutoCAD is f-ing terrible. Let's talk about it

17 points by arctan ↗ HN
I've used AutoCAD for ten years, and I fucking hate it. When it's good, it's just marginally not too shitty. When it's bad, it's terrible. While I have become fairly experienced with using it, the quirks, inconsistencies and limitations often make it exasperating to deal with, and occasionally make it nightmarish. This puts me in the awkward position of doing something I've come more often recently to downright hate.

I want your best AutoCAD time saving and optimization tricks. Maybe a knowledge share like this will also be useful for other drafters and engineers who scroll HN.

While I'm not a programmer, I'd also like to hear thoughts from programmers who are familiar with AutoCAD. If an engineering entrepreneur with an unlimited budget, determined to start from scratch while keeping goodness about the things that are good, dropped the code on your desk and said 'okay what do we do with this shit?', what would your answer be?

Oh and, BTW, please don't hold back if you happen to have dank AutoCAD memes and/or a similar amount of ire (all of it) as I do for Autodesk and their associated hellspawn.

Thanks!

20 comments

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superchroma
To boot, autodesk finally has a licensing model so terrible, their awful software will never be the square focus of criticism even again.

https://twitter.com/ColinWilliamson/status/15702108536891105...

ohiovr
Autodesk loves to buy companies to eliminate the competition. The newly bought software exists for a while but soon, they simply eliminate it like they did with Softimage. Adobe does the exact same thing of buying competition and then destroying it. Softimage was well loved, so was Director. Director may have been a product without future, but adobe mismanaged Flash so that's gone forever and with it thousands of sites that had great content.

If I never use another adobe product in my life, I'm fine with that totally.

syncbehind
>Adobe does the exact same thing of buying competition and then destroying it

Oh. That's why they bought Figma. My heart breaks

noSyncCloud
I'm literally speechless. They cannot keep getting away with this shit (but somehow they always do).
chunkles
Use the extra command line option '/nologo' to remove the splash screen and speed up time to first action by a decent amount.
adfm
Adobe and Amazon are husks of their former selves and rely on the life force of companies they acquire to maintain that youthful glow. Solidworks is dope, but AEC is already using Rhino/Grasshopper for all the interesting bits. Worth investigating if you’re looking for something programmatic, accurate, with a considerably advanced ecosystem that plays well with others.
SubjectToChange
If you hate AutoCAD then try out BricsCAD, or perhaps even Draftsight if you're willing. Otherwise, if you're not working in construction or architecture, move to a 3D CAD package. AutoCAD is simply outclassed by mid-range 3D options like SolidWorks.
galfarragem
I have the opposite opinion: autoCAD is great. A true emacs for CAD. It has a really steep learning curve but once you get it is as essential as Excel and a tool for life. You can draw everything there and (like emacs) script it with lisp.
arctan
Okay, three questions, if you'll humor me: What LISP resources particular to AutoCAD would you recommend, what are your favorite scripts, and for context what do you do / use AutoCAD for?
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galfarragem
1 & 2: Best generalist lisp routines were natively included along the years. So "lisps" (as non-tech guys call autocad scripts), nowadays, only make sense to answer to custom needs. You can be sure that any architectural office have plenty of stuff (design related) that could be gladly optimized/automated. The problem is that they rarely have a person (or the budget) to do it.

3: I'm an architect (housing kind).

Newbies use to hate Autocad. I hated it in the beginning also. It will take at least a couple months until you start to get some profits from it. A couple years to get proficient.

aaronarduino
Best tip I have is to change the settings to have right mouse button enter/repeat last command. Saves so much time when drafting pipe isos.

But really why is 3D in AutoCAD so slow even on a very fast computer with a top of the line graphics card?

logicalmonster
How suitable is Blender for CAD tasks? And if Blender isn't suitable today, how difficult would it be to make CAD features some kind of addon?
wilsongoode
There’s CAD Sketcher, an add on for Blender that is trying to do exactly that. Can’t comment on whether it succeeds as I’ve never used it.
rapjr9
I noted the same thing 15 years ago and asked around about it. A prof at the college I worked at said tools like this (PCB design tools are similarly awful) don't have a big market, so there is not a lot of competition or funds for development. Maybe that is less true today with more people designing their own PCB boards and 3D printed objects. There is also lock-in, if all your CAD is in AutoCAD are you going to scrap it all and start with a new tool? While there is often some ability to export to a common format and import to a new tool, often lots of little important things get left out. So the tools don't get improved much because the vendors don't have to improve them since few people have a choice, and even if there is more of a customer base today the barrier to entry is high since the tools are complicated. The free tools also make financing improvements difficult since they reduce profit. Open source and open standards can help somewhat here, but things like the odd interface Blender used for so long can limit adoption. BRL-CAD which started life as a US Army project is interesting:

https://brlcad.org/

I haven't used it lately but it was very stable, reliable, and powerful. It had a command line interface which made it somewhat clunky to use, but it was a very capable program. I think a GUI or two have been added to it to make it easier to use. It uses constructive solid geometry (adding and subtracting solids) to create objects, though I see they have added B-Reps to it.

The fact that the early CAD tools all used command line interfaces instead of GUI's also may explain some of the awfulness, many of them tacked a GUI on top of the command line interface instead of rewriting the software from the ground up, and some of that funky command line weirdness may persist in the strange workarounds the GUI's had to use.

arctan
Update: I found a solution to a particular problem, representing twisted pairs with bends in a cable without the hassle of sloppy line thickness settings, or making sure every bounding area is perfectly joined and closed for hatch fill: to do it in Solidworks instead ('fit spline' FTW!) and export to dwg... lol
AbundantSalmon
Developer now but was originally a mechanical engineer and have dealt with some CAD software in my time. Solidworks > Fusion360 >> AutoCAD 2D has been my experience. Though I have to admit that the AutoCAD 2D was not my day to day software and I had originally come from 3D CAD as opposed to starting with 2D/AutoCAD initially. When I used AutoCAD for the first time I had an instant distaste for it and can see where you are coming from, the interface and the way of "drawing" was unintuitive, and I could never work out how make my lines be parametric instead of having to redraw them when related dimensions changed (though that could be a me problem).

I think the reasons it is still popular are:

- People who learnt to draft with pencil and paper are still around

- Legacy, still so many drawings that they don't want to have to remodel. The open format exports are never perfect.

- 2D layouts are just practical for a lot of industries (electrical, HVAC, MEP, etc) where they are just need to convey connection information or everything is nice boxes on planes and they don't need spend more time extruding out a 3D when they can just easily just draw an arrow and go "AxBmm". But apparently Revit, which haven't used, is becoming more popular int the MEP/HVAC space apparently?

I know my friend has lots of drop in templates and scripts that they have built up over the years.

galfarragem
AutoCAD is still a standard because it is flexible and scales great. You can draw as easily a pcb, a dog house or a city.

Imagine you are starting a concept for an housing block. You are just starting to "shape it". You don't really know if it will be a square or a rectangle or even a more complex polygon. If you use BIM (e.g. Revit), you'll need to define what wall is exactly made of, what kind (and brand!) of window is it, etc, since the beginning.. you don't even know yet what the building will look like! It's completely nonsense and an huge incentive to repetition: you use what you already have in your library once it is a massive hassle to create new objects.

When the project is settled and approved by authorities, then and only then, may pay (depending on the scale) to convert it to BIM: you'll get 3D renderings, bill of quantities and a realtime model of the building out of the box.

An analogy for HNers: Autocad is a text editor (emacs kind), BIM is an IDE.