I’ve tried the dev branch of FreeCAD for a while now, but backed off due to how unpolished it felt. But when I saw FreeCAD V1 RC2 pre-release on GitHub Id thought to try it out.

My first impressions didn’t blow me away, sure there were nice UI touches here and there. But nothing really stood out to me. But that changed when I started cading.

It’s not a major overhaul to my eyes. But the nice touches are everywhere. Like adding a TinkerCAD navigation controls option for beginners, and smart snapping and auto constraints enabled by default. So, so nice especially for noobs who don’t know that >.< is a centre constraint in the tool bar.

But I had a quick project, tonight. Redesign an older model from scratch to add in new parts. My original designs were some of the first real work I did in FreeCAD so it was nice to see the improvements. Out side of legacy bugs like attaching a 3 point arc to a line still being present, the process was smooth, not as pain free as Fusion, but better.

Then at the end when I was adding text to my part. I got to see the best update of them all. If you aren’t aware, adding text to a model is annoying. Especially if you want it a distance from a side or in the middle. You needed to use the measuring tool to get deltas and re measure after every change. I was using the new measuring tool like that too, and thank you devs for adding manual controls and deltas. But at the end, I left the measurements on the text, updated the values, and noticed the numbers updated on me… OMG best feature of all time 10/10 best CAD software in the world. This makes my life soooooo much easier now.

If you haven’t already try the RC versions of FreeCAD do so. Sure there is still some open source jank in it, but it’s so much more polished than before that I feel this upcoming release deserves the V1 moniker.