Introduction to LibrePCB A new, powerful and intuitive EDA tool for everyone

Here's a video from FOSDEM where Urban (the main author) explains why he started LibrePCB and how the library concepts are different from other similar tools like KiCAD: ▶ this video (Slides: link ) Also, previous HN threads: link link

Before people start asking: Comparison with KiCAD and Eagle: link Talk by Urban that explains why he started LibrePCB, and how the library concepts are different from other similar tools like KiCAD: ▶ this video (Slides: link ) If you want to try it: link Previous HN discussion: link

There's also an "Intro to LibrePCB" talk recording from FOSDEM this year: ▶ this video It explains some of the core design concepts and the rationale for them. In case you don't have time to watch the video, here are the slides: link

U. Bruhin (the primary author of LibrePCB) answered this question on Reddit ( link ): ---Quote:--- Hi! LibrePCB has some very new concepts, especially for library management. You should take a look at my talk at FOSDEM: ▶ this video (Slides: link ) As these are extremely different to KiCad's concepts, it would be very difficult to contribute that to KiCad because they need to provide backward compatibility. And KiCad already has a lot of legacy code, so it would become even worse when changing very fundamental concepts. It's very questionable if KiCad developers even would accept such fundamental changes - actually I'm pretty sure that they wouldn't agree with some of LibrePCB's concepts. So the only way was to create a completely new project. And LibrePCB 0.1.0 is only the beginning - I have many more ideas how an EDA tool should look like. With a standalone project I'm much more flexible to implement new features than if every feature would need to be contributed to KiCad.

It's something we thought about, but I think it's somewhat orthogonal to the question of serialization - you still need code to go back and forth between the representation in the database and the native data structures. See link for a deeper discussion of issues around a file format for a font editor. One of the biggest current pain points is dealing with merges in version control (usually git). I think there are ways of dealing with that in an sqlite-based file format, but I worry it would require some custom tooling, especially to make sure invariants aren't violated. Another interesting example is LibrePCB (see ▶ this video ) who devised their own text based format specifically to make version control more friendly.

I haven't used any of these before, but this LibrePCB talk explains why they wanted an alternative: ▶ this video Horizon docs have this explanation: link