I’ve used several CAD/CAM softwares in my time, but I have to say I’m pretty disappointed with carveco. I’ve been using it for the past few months because a free year came with my new CNC, but there’s a slim to none chance of me continuing my subscription once the free trial is up. Nearly every time I use this SW I find something else that makes using it just that much more cumbersome. That being said, I am open to my mind being changed. If someone can tell me fixes to the issues I have, thereby making the use of the program more enjoyable, I’m all ears.
I have been trying to post this same thread on the carveco community forum but for a week now the post has been pending. Symptomatic of that whole org I think…
A few gripes:
Each time I search the forums or carveco website for the varied issues I have, I’m very seldom able to find clear answers. This isn’t because of a nuanced problem and there are many ways to accomplish a task. It’s due to me not finding any other instances. Maybe that’s because it’s newish and a library hasn’t had the chance to be built yet, but it sure is aggravating.
There are many ways to make CAD/CAM more efficient, and one of my favorites is hotkeys. However, the hotkeys that I’d like to apply to actions in carveco aren’t allowed. Moreover, one of the MOST frustrating things I’ve found is that when I try to assign a shortcut key to some buttons, they are “assigned” to something called “New Menu”. There is no command in the structure called New Menu when I search for it, therefore I can’t unassign the current hotkey and reassign to what I want to. Additionally, when I do press any of the several hotkeys for “New Menu”, absolutely NOTHING happens. I’ve tried it with different windows/toolbars open within carveco and still see nothing. Absolutely useless, and I can’t unassign it in order to reassign the hotkey command. Also, there are multiple hotkey commands that are assigned to “New Menu”, so it’s not like it’s just one command that I’ve ben deprived of, but several. Sheesh!
What the heck is “Cursor Info Settings” in the options menu? There are two fields that are under this submenu, Opacity and Text Size. I was hoping that I’d be able to enlarge the text size of the GUI to make things easier to read, but changing these has no effect that I have been able to discern. I’m sure they do something, but I can’t find any forum topic about it and I’ve watched so many videos from carveo tutorials that I would think I’d have come across it by now.
If that’s not the way to adjust the text size of the GUI, then how would I do that? If I can’t do that, that’s a really dumb miss by carveco. I can change the text size for the PC so all programs have that, but a) carveco is the only one that’s difficult to read, and b) when I do that, the fields the numbers are in don’t change so it just leads to even greater legibility issues.
As I said, I’m open to having my opinion of carveco completely turned around and be shown that I was just not finding the correct menu options for a lot of these issues. I’d still argue that carveco did a poor job of making things intuitive if that’s the case, but I wouldn’t completely talk trash on it. I will genuinely be grateful for any solutions or insight from others. Show me the error of my ways.