Software >

(on Wikipedia)
http://openscad.org/

The Programmers Solid 3D CAD Modeller

In general, this is a wonderful program. A great editor, and it's quite easy to use.

Unfortunately, it really is for programmers. While I can muddle through everything, I'm not a programmer so it's extremely time consuming for me to make anything.

• http://openscad.org/documentation.html

• http://openscad.org/cheatsheet/index.html

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• https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/OpenSCAD_User_Manual/First_Steps

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• I'm not sure what plus.google.com/explore/coffeescad was ^[ 1 ] You can see some stuff in this archive if you're morbidly curious: https://web.archive.org/web/20160909071402id_/plus.google.com/explore/coffeescad

2015-05-05 ∞

• control-d and shift-control-d comment and uncomment! YAY!

• When generating an arrow, a red dot appears to roughly indicate the line to look at.

  • I have no idea how to get rid of that dot.
  • I have no idea how to clear the console.
  • These are problems because I don't know if I've fixed the issue..

2015-05-02 ∞

OpenSCAD-2015.03-1-x86-64-Installer on Windows 8.1, updated recently.

Reading http://www.tridimake.com/2014/09/how-to-use-openscad-tricks-and-tips-to.html

• View > Hide editor

  • I'll use Geany.

• Design > Automatic Reload And Compile

  • (default)
• I did a 'save as' and made the .scad file so I can open it in Geany.
• "Each command you give to Openscad must end with a semicolon." Madness.
• Oh! It immediately sees and reacts to changes to the .scad text file.
• Left-click-drag moves everything in the wrong direction.
• When I zoom in, its measurement lines get chopped off. What the hell..
• the tutorial is a bitch to copy-paste because it has leading spaces for its code examples. Ugh.
• The default editor really is just fine for learning. The tutorial author should not have suggested otherwise. It will probably be good for advanced stuff later on.
• Using the default editor requires pressing F5 on any change. It would be interesting if this was somehow not necessary.
• YES, it uses control-shift-z to re-do!
• The interface has nice colour themes.
• The inline editor has nice syntax highlighting, including highlighting the source of errors.

• The inline editor has code folding!

  • It expands/collapses in the way I expect, remembering how things were. I can shift-click to expand all children folds under a parent fold.
  • I don't see a feature to collapse/expand all. From what I can tell, one could wrap braces around everything and shift-click to unfold everything.
  • Bug: If I have nothing but blank lines underneath a folded area, folding will jump all text so that the fold is the very last line in the editor. I'm expecting no text movement except to have the very bottom blank lines moved up. Perhaps this is because the editor is confused and cannot deal with lines which are past the bottom line. That is, it is not as smart as Geany for the ability to scroll down so far that the bottom line is scrolling up and there are null lines below it.
• I cannot control-up/control-down to jump paragraphs. Ugh. It acts the same as alt-up/alt-down which is to move the lines of the editor without changing where the cursor is.

• I strongly wish that things like translate and color could be put after an object's creation. It doesn't make sense for this information to exist before the object, and makes reading the code difficult.

  • I have to do some pretty ugly indentation to make code line up in a sensible manner.
• How do I clear the console?
• Shouldn't the console have a timestamp for each item?
• Defining variables with a leading dollar sign seems ugly and wrong. e.g. $variable=1
• control-scrollwheel-up jumps up a page of code. Yay!

When done:

• F6 to computes the shape

• File > Export > Export as STL

  • The top of the editor has "STL" for doing this quickly.