Focus on bug fixes

I was searching around for a good CAD program and stumbled across this one, and I really like the overall functionality - it takes me back to when I used to use AutoCAD 15 years ago, exactly what I was looking for.  However after using it for a couple hours and trying to familiarize myself with the commands again I've run across a lot of bugs.  

And according to sourceforge some of these bugs in core features like the hatching have been open for...6-8 years.  I'd really suggest prioritizing the stability above everything else, because it's really frustrating to just have stuff randomly disappear from your drawing or settings completely change when you reopen it.

Here's just a quick synopsis of things I've encountered in my first couple hours.

-Hatching won't apply if not an exactly closed box, if you have a box with lines that overhang, it refuses to hatch the closed area - annoying.

-Hatching constantly disappears when you try to move it, or change it to a different layer, or basically touch it in any way, and then you have to reselect all the lines to reapply it again. Annoying and time consuming.  Sometimes it randomly disappears even when I haven't touched it as far as I know, not sure if this was due to a save and close or during a previous session.

-If you create lines on one layer, then switch to another layer and create a block out of the lines, the block belongs to both layers, hiding either one will make it disappear.  There doesn't seem to be any way to fix this besides deleting and re-placing the block from the block list onto the desired layer.

-If you delete a block from the block list and try to save another block with the same name, the program complains, it thinks another block already exists with that name even though you deleted it.

- After using the program for a while some items are starting to disappear, but if I zoom out I can see them again, zoom in again and they disappear even though the screen is in a position where they should be visible.  Closing and reopening the program fixes this, at least for now.

- After closing and reopening the program, settings I had chosen in Current Drawing Preferences > Dimensions have randomly changed. Which changes all the dimensions on my architectural diagram.  At first glance it looks like the Text Height, Arrow Size, Tick Size, Offset, Linear Units have changed - there might be others as well but definitely those ones.  And they didn't change to the defaults that were in there before I set it.  The text height went from 5 to 2.5, offset went from 5 to 0.625, units changed from Architectural to something else, etc.  Doesn't seem to be a pattern to it.


Overall I really like the program, it's just difficult if you can't count on the reliability of things staying where you put them and looking the way you configured them to look.

Many of the issues you complain about have been adressed meanwhile in the development version, it is at  
 2.2.0 rc3 now and stable for real work.  I strongly recommend to use that. Your verdict might be milder then.
It's known there are many deficiencies with LibreCAD, the problem is there are too few developers.

Thanks, I just downloaded the rc3 that you suggested, I didn't realize the version provided by the main sourceforge download button was so outdated - might make sense to point that to a newer release, looks like the 2.1.3 version it provides is dated 2016 as well.

Agreed - it would be nice if it was clearer to the user how to quickly and easily upgrade to the latest 'stable' or latest 'development' versions. Every time I update it always seems to become more of a runaround than strictly necessary.