SolveSpace: a lesser known FOSS gem
SolveSpace: a lesser known FOSS gem
No, it’s not the main program I use, but its constraint solver gets around, and doing a couple of tutorials helped me understand parametric design better. The forum on the site is also active and helpful. Definitely worth having installed.
It's also a cross-platform portable executable, so you can use it out of the box on almost any machine with an internet connection. Once you get the hotkey bindings down, it gets very easy to build simple designs. Unfortunately, it can choke on modest levels of complexity, but I most of my work is relatively simple, so Solvespace is a godsend.
I’ve heard it described as the MS Paint of 3-D CAD, and that feels about right.
Solvespace is like a time traveler from the golden age of software where everything was a 1 MB self-contained EXE.