Being a long time Eagle user, I'll chime in too. Most responses from KiCAD advocates miss the mark on the fundamental issue. Sure the features are converging and I have no doubt KiCAD will catch-up. It has already surpassed Eagle in many feature areas. But people who routinely spend dozens of hours a week doing eCAD work (> than a hobbyist), use their tool as a super-efficient extension of their workflow intent. To suddenly switch to a tool with an entirely different workflow or UI mechanics is like a right handed person trying to relearn how to do everything left handed. It's takes a really long frustrating time. Maybe even longer than if you didn't know Eagle, Altium, Cadence, DS5000, etc to begin with.
My hope is the KiCAD community would see this as an opportunity to significantly grow the user base by adding conversion tools and UI improvements designed to help new-comers from other tools transition more easily; even prioritize them short-term over additional new features. Even vi and emacs have mutual key-binding compatibility modes designed to ease transitions - and the user base couldn't be more divided on pride. I find the KiCAD UI 'clunky' and it really isn't. It's only clunky coming from my Eagle point of view. -Alan On 2017-02-17 12:46, Guy Sotomayor Jr wrote: > Just to add my $0.02 to this conversation. I'm an Eagle (professional) user > for > well over a decade. The issue the Phillip mentioned about footprints and > designs > is real. > > On my last design I decided to give KiCAD a try and quickly realized that the > large libraries of parts and footprints I have would have to be completely > re-done. > That made the bar too high to switch. Most of my designs use footprints that > I have > developed or are readily available. Also, many new parts vendors supply Eagle > libraries for their parts so I don't have to develop them. I haven't seen > anything > for KiCAD regarding that...which means even more work for me. > > Tool lock-in is a real phenomenon not just for the "wet-ware" but also for > all of the > parts libraries that exist for the tools (either vendor, community or self > developed). > So without a support infrastructure for parts libraries, a tool is just a > "toy" regardless > of how good the underlying implementation is. > > In terms of community supplied libraries, Eagle has those too and I've found > that > by and large they are junk (it's easier/quicker for me to create a part on my > own > than to try and figure out what bizarre thing the contributor actually did > and I still > need to check it anyway). While I haven't seen a lot of KiCAD contributed > libraries > (that's part of the problem) I have no expectation that they would be better > than > the Eagle contributed libraries. > > TTFN - Guy
