Any decent cad programs that have good work flow?

[Red Squirrel]

I just want to do basic designs, but all the cad programs in Linux that I've found seem to suck, they lack proper work flow. Ex: I want to select a bunch of stuff, quickly copy and drag a new copy over somewhere, or just move something etc, like with just holding down control or something. Trying to use LibreCAD and it lacks so much basic functionality. it seems once you make something you can't easily move or copy it. There might be some way through some convoluted menus, but I just want to be able to do it in real time with the mouse. So if I need to make a lot of a similar object that match I just want to be able to quickly copy/paste them where I want, maybe move them later etc. It seems a lot of open source programs seem to lack this very basic functionality. Gimp is another one that always annoys me when it comes to that. Very simple move/copy/cut operations should be doable without even needing to go through any kind of menu and it should just be real time. In most Windows programs, you do that by just holding down control.

I managed to do it with ctrl+v and ctrl+c but problem is it puts the object so far away from the cursor that I can't really place it where I want because the cursor can only go so far until it hits the edge of the screen but object is still not where I want, I'm very limited in where it can go. It's just so unintuitive.

 

[lxskllr]

Librecad will be your best bet afaik. Have you used cad(autocad, microstation, whatever...) before? I find them all unintuitive, but I don't really know cad. Even though it's the best libre cad, I'm pretty sure it sucks from what I've read, but the workflow issues may be inherent to cad software. IOW, you might have some learning to do before it becomes useful.

 

[Red Squirrel]

The biggest thing I miss from Autocad is the ability to just type in dimensions. And drag/drop selected chunks. Like in Libre cad when you start to draw a line you can't just type say, "10" to make it 10 units long. You need to actually go by the grid. It's doable, just not as fast as being able to quickly whip out a shape by typing numbers. I think you can type coordinates but that is less useful as typing relative distances. I sometimes use Autocad in a VM when I need to do anything serious but trying my best to get away from even having to depend on windows/programs.

For 3D work been wanting to learn Blender as well though I found the same in that program it's hard to make something a specific size and there's no snap etc, but Blender is not really made for precision work either.