Tag Archives: Best

The best feature ever added to AutoCAD is…

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…LISP. I have now closed the What are the best features ever added to AutoCAD? poll, and the winner is AutoLISP/Visual LISP, by a long, long way. I don’t always agree with the majority view expressed in the polls here, but in this case I wholeheartedly agree. Adding LISP was the biggest and best thing that ever happened to AutoCAD. Autodesk owes an enormous debt of gratitude to John Walker for incorporating the work of David Betz, who was of course standing on the shoulders of John McCarthy. It’s a crying shame that Autodesk has been so terribly neglectful of Visual LISP for over a decade.

Here are your top ten “best ever” AutoCAD features:

  • AutoLISP / Visual LISP (32%)
  • Paper / Model Space / Layouts (21%)
  • Xrefs (20%)
  • Copy / Paste between drawings (19%)
  • Dynamic Blocks (16%)
  • Object Snaps (15%)
  • Layer Visibility per Viewport (12%)
  • Undo (12%)
  • Grips (12%)
  • AutoSnap (9%)

Something interesting I noticed is the age of these features:

  • AutoLISP / Visual LISP – 1985 (significantly improved 1999)
  • Paper / Model Space / Layouts – 1990 (significantly improved 1999)
  • Xrefs – 1990
  • Copy / Paste between drawings – 1991
  • Dynamic Blocks – 2005
  • Object Snaps – 1984
  • Layer Visibility per Viewport – 1990 (improved 2008)
  • Undo – 1986
  • Grips – 1992
  • AutoSnap – 1992

The youngest feature here is 6 years old, the oldest is 27. The average top-ten AutoCAD feature is over 20 years old. What does that tell you?

Best and worst AutoCAD features ever – polls

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Using your suggestions and a few of my own, I have added two polls for you to select what are, in your opinion, the best and worst features ever added to AutoCAD. To help us find The Answer, there are 42 items in each poll, from which you can choose up to three.

A few items (e.g. Action Recorder) made it into both lists, while several items in the ‘worst’ list (e.g. 2012 Array, Ribbon, Annotative Scaling) were suggested multiple times. It will be interesting to see how the poll results pan out.

What are the best and worst features ever added to AutoCAD?

Audience participation time, I think. A comment on one of AutoCAD 2012’s new features recently set me thinking about what were the worst features ever introduced to AutoCAD. That in turn got me thinking about what were the best.

I’ll keep my opinions to myself for a while, as I’d like your input and don’t want to influence it. Please add a comment with your list of what you consider the best three features ever added to AutoCAD and the worst three. If you can’t think of three of each, you can submit less, but please don’t submit more. By all means discuss at length the things you love or loathe, but make it clear what you’re submitting by using a clear format like this (meaningless examples only):

Best:
1. Content Explorer
2. Online Help
3. Nudge

Worst:
1. AutoLISP
2. Transparent zoom and pan
3. Paper/model space

What do the words “feature”, “best” and “worst” mean? I’ll leave that for you to decide for yourself. You might consider “worst” to be something that’s a bad idea, poorly implemented, slow, inefficient, poorly documented, bloated, buggy, half-baked in the short or long term, clueless in some other way, or some or all of the above. It’s up to you.

When I have enough submissions, I’ll collate the most popular (and unpopular) features into a pair of polls for you all to vote on. Have fun!

Edit: I have now added the polls and closed comments on this post.