The documentation looks excellent!
I’m definitely going to try this for my next PCB project. I’ve tried basically all of the other free options (Designspark PCB, Eagle, Kicad, Geda, Horizon) and Horizon is the only one really worth using IMO (Designspark PCB is also decent).
Eagle and Geda are trash. Don’t waste your time.
Kicad should be great, but they’ve made a number of insane UX decisions that make it really unusable in practice. Horizon is actually based on the pretty good Kicad engine but it fixes most of the UX mess.
Kicad should be great, but they’ve made a number of insane UX decisions that make it really unusable in practice. Horizon is actually based on the pretty good Kicad engine but it fixes most of the UX mess.
Do you have an example? I use KiCAD pretty regularly, and while they do have some odd defaults for a lot of their tools and keybindings, I rarely run into one that can’t be changed/fixed in the settings.
I haven’t used it for a very long time but IIRC if you drag a component in the schematic view, by default it leaves all the wires behind!
I also recall they have a super confusing file format (a
.prettydirectory or something? Wtf is that?). I note that LibrePCB claims one of its features is a sane file format, presumably in response to that.That is true.
However, the alternative is altium behavior where it drags all of the wire connections with you, so if you move anything attached to an IC or the IC itself, you get dozens of shorts immediately.
They both have pros and cons. I actually prefer kicad’s way because it will never lead to unintended un-ERC-discoverable shorts.
I have used both KiCAD and Altium regularly for years and there are many things that KiCAD simply does better but it is missing a ton of QoL things.
The one thing that I don’t like about KiCAD is that some shortcuts don’t have an alternative right click or toolbar menu item, which makes them undiscoverable unless you browse shortcuts.
I really like librePCBs approach to library management. Multiple pinouts for schematic symbols (meaning a BGA and QFN can have the same library item) and the categorization.
Though I can’t tell if they have reusable footprints and are able to simply reference them to a schematic symbol which is one of the nice things in KiCAD over altium
I picked up LibrePCB almost 2 years ago and it’s been a pleasant learning curve. I can highly recommend it, both for beginners and more advanced users.
It is still missing some few features like auto routing, but if you don’t use it, it does a great job.
