Being open source, I would love for the openSCAD community to make the buttons & icons customizable, and the toolbars too. That way, people could develop their own toolbar sets and share them with the community. I do realize, of course, that this could cause a number of training issues, with people being even more confused about how to learn FCAD.
You know that the FreeCAD UI is fully customizable right?
The images are just files you can replace. There is even a themes plugin you can install.
You can also remove the tool bars completely and go for the hotkey and menu options alone.
FreeCad has a lot of plug ins and such that could turn it into a complete parametric CAD wich can compare expensives CAD for good! Still you need to learn it! I really love it as much as SolidWorks!
Yeah, but the point is to learn something that lasts. When I started three years ago learning how CAD works, I had to make a decision about which tool I want to learn. The Damocles sword above Fusion360 was there already. Everyone was happy using it, because it is free and stays free. On the other side I considered if I won´t stick with CAD. What if I don´t like it or the just starting hobby 3D printing would make the CAD stuff obsolete?
Having my data behind an even potential paywall happened to me once before with a Publishing Software from Microsoft. They dropped it and till today there is no way to import the files into something else, because of the closed source file type. I had to recreate the projects from scratch and those were far less complex than a CAD model or some depth.
With CAD there are a couple of file formats you can export and import editable models, but you will loose information in that process. Features from one application that did not translate well onto the other application. We had that with Word and free writing suits. It took years to get all basic features like foot notes and stuff to be imported right.
So I fell the decision to use FreeCAD and learn it. Do to its open source nature it is unlikely to go away, the file format is open (as the source is open) and you as user have a way to improve the application by giving input and feedback. That is something Autodesk happily took from their free sheep’s and now they are closing the gates.
Instead of paying 30-35$ a month to autodesk you could spend 5$ or what you are willing to spend a month to the FreeCAD community. If only some companies would see this as an opportunity to get what they want instead of getting something they payed for.
It is just sad that so many people did tutorials on a free Fusion360 and just now the users get lost in the woods of regulations. Again using FreeCAD to learn CAD for free seems to be the way of the future.
You do realize I addressed both of your points in my previous post, right? But, just for the heck of it, I went ot the link you posted. I read down the page. It said to go to Tools/Addon manager and search for IconThemes. Well, I can’t do that. There is no search box. How do I even know which tab to select: Workbenches or Macros? – it doesn’t specify; it just says to search, presumably using the non-existent search box. I looked through the list of Macros; there is no IconThemes item in the list. There is no Toolbar*, no Theme*, no Icon*, There is only 1 item in Workbenches, and it isn’t IconThemes. It’s useless.
I wouldn’t want zero toolbars. What I would like is a toolbar or 2 with dropdown lists of items related to the top item of each list. This would be much more compact and so much less distracting.
I strongly agree with you!!!
Thanks for that. I have 0.19 and my Addon manager does not have anything like that many items in the list. In fact, I have only MOOC. I installed it, to see if it would make any difference, even though I have no idea what it is. It did not make any difference that I can see.
Perhaps the issue is that none of the other workbenches are compatible with 0.19??
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Welllllllllllll, let me see! They have a forum, don’t they? I must check this out my friend!
Have you installed V0.18.4 the stable varsion? 0.19 seem to be pre release version.
I installed 0.19 because that’s what DrVAX has installed. Perhaps I should try 18.4, to see if the Addon manager looks different. Still, I have to say that I’m getting more & more impressed, and comfortable, with openSCAD. In fact, I have a project that is printing right now, that was designed completely in openSCAD. I’ll post about a bit later.
I admire your “geekness”. My son has been doing three D animation for 20 years when he wasn’t doing gardening and construction. And he is a consumate artist not like me I never was very good. As far as learning 3d modeling I haven’t even really tried but when you are 75 and brain dea it could not end well.
A pre release version has a lots of bugs to get fixed untill it’s stable release.
Geekness??? I could say " researching and playing arround" 
It is not really a derogative term. I have been a geek all my life.
Oh, trust me, I know, only too well. Over the decades I’ve been involved in numerous software development projects. As I mentioned in another post a while back, developing good test datasets is one of the hardest SW development tasks I’ve ever done.
Except I’m too old and stupid to be a geek now. I’m waiting for what Joe biden has.
I remember that!
Very interesting. I wonder what would happen if you uninstalled 0.18? Would it, or would it not, uninstall the ability to find all those workbenches?
You don’t have to unisntall it at all since V 0.19 is portable!
So, what you’re saying is you could move the 0.19 installation to a computer that doesn’t have 0.18 to see if the Addon manager works the same?