The drafting styles appearance and modifications are different. The only thing that threw me for a few minutes was the D command. That's a holy shit moment because I feel like I'm no longer beholden to AutoDesk's subscription system. Buttons, not ribbons are used and every command I have used in AutoCad has been able to be used in DraftSight. Buttons were bad enough but now the ribbons are ridiculous.Īfter that history lesson.this is why DraftSight reminded me of older versions of AutoCad. I want my AutoCad experience to have as much drawing area as possible on my monitor.

Why does this matter? It matters because I don't use the new ribbon system - I only use it in Inventor. I still type most of my commands (E for erase, Z for zoom, etc). I did use pull downs with Land Desktop/Softdesk/LDD but that's another story. I learned cad by typing most commands (or their corresponding short cut letter) and never relied on too many buttons and rarely used pull downs for plain drafting. Specific colors of the command bar and text (dark green bar, yellow text), and specific buttons on a bar that contained only a few necessary commands. After so many years of AutoCad, I developed a system. That's not a knock against Draftsight, but a knock against AutoCad. Here is what it feels going from AutoCad to DraftSight.ĭraftsight reminds me of what AutoCad used to be a decade ago. One minute later.Well, I just did the math and at a conservative estimate, I have probably 50,000 hours of AutoCad usage under my belt. Doing the math is silly, but let's say I have a lot of experience in AutoCad.

For comparison, I've been using AutoCad for 28 years and most of that time was working 40 hours a week or more of pure drafting. I've been using DraftSight for a week now with roughly 30 hours of drafting.

Autocad draftsight