I use gEDA for both professional and personal projects and find it very convenient. I won't dig into many details, here are a few I like to comment on.
What I like in gEDA is the ease of use when moving components around: click and drag, middle click to rotate (when placing). I'm not too much fond of the two-key in sequence but I recon it has its uses given how keyboard-centric the gEDA suite is. And this is precisely the power of the software, you have to get through it to master it. I've tried Kicad once or twice and I find its tool suite much more consistent and smoothly integrated.
One little quirk that makes me laugh: if you place vias while the "Skinny" track shortcut is selected, they get flagged by the DRC tool because the annular ring is too small
.
There are only two features I hate in gEDA:
- Zooms and Moves are part of the undo/redo buffer in schematics and that is atrocious when you really have to navigate the undo/redo chain. More often than not do I realize an attribute was zapped or left over while replaying the undo/redo buffer, for instance. As a consequence I try to use it... not.
- Less annoying is the lack of consistency with keyboard and mouse usage between both software: e.g. middle button drag (schematics) vs left button drag (pcb). It gets me sometimes and is annoying both ways because middle button drags an item in pcb and left button in schematics pops up a menu from which you may quickly select a destructive item.
What I like in gEDA very much is you can build up a component using an generic symbol and a footprint. For instance, no need to list all the variants of PNP transistors; just pick up a generic PNP transistor and set its case footprint. In some cases you might need to define proper slotting to match the case pinout but you don't need to create new symbols and/or footprints for that. All right, you have to know your components but I for one consider it's a must.
But... the absolute killer feature (compared with other proprietary software, mostly): documents are
text files! Man, nothing can beat that. I only recently had to modify hundreds of vias because the annular ring was too small according to Eurocircuit. Even if there is a console command, I just quickly edited the PCB in a text editor and checked the vias. Then I changed the vias thickness with GNU
sed. In most cases you'd need
awk or
gawk to make sure you change the proper field.
And this is only one example why text files are useful. Another example is GIT to manage versions and revisions of your boards. And GIT, while it can manage binary files, is at its best with text.