Good Free Cad for house design

[DianneB]

I have been using AutoCAD professionally since 1987. The company used to allow us to have a copy at home but with "on-line licensing" the company has to pay for each installed copy so they have stopped that. I purchased AutoCAD-LT many years ago but it is too far out of date now to be of much use - if I open a drawing with a newer version, I can no longer "save it back" to work with LT.

As a long-time user, I usually draft with one hand on the keyboard and one on the mouse almost never using pull-down menus. I have tried a few different free CADs but haven't found one that supports the 'shortcut keys' (keyboard entries such as "z" + "a" for "zoom all") and it drives me NUTS! There are so many versions of free or almost-free CAD but I can't find one functionally identical to AutoCAD but there is no way I can justify the price of AutoCAD for home use.

Does anybody know if there is a free or inexpensive CAD that supports shortcut keys?????

[ruysg]

Dassault's DraftSight, mentioned by ludesign, is quite similiar to autocad, and you can configure the shortcut keys (alias).

However I would imagine any decent CAD package, even freeware, should have such functionality.

Regards,
Ruy

[ACuttle]

Originally Posted by DianneB

As a long-time user, I usually draft with one hand on the keyboard and one on the mouse almost never using pull-down menus. I have tried a few different free CADs but haven't found one that supports the 'shortcut keys' (keyboard entries such as "z" + "a" for "zoom all") and it drives me NUTS! There are so many versions of free or almost-free CAD but I can't find one functionally identical to AutoCAD but there is no way I can justify the price of AutoCAD for home use.

Does anybody know if there is a free or inexpensive CAD that supports shortcut keys?????

For my use I found ZWCad (I think £300 last time I bought a copy) to work very similarly to AutoCAD and the few variations I did come across could be reconfigured, though it will depend on the commands your using. I'm facing the opposite at the moment, that I've use LT and ZWCad for the last few years and recently upgraded to full 2011 and everything has changed - properly annoying.

[DianneB]

Hey Ruysg I owe you a coffee!!! That DraftSight works FANTASTIC (for an old dyed-in-the-wool AutoCAD user)!

Thanks HEAPS!