Interface

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Introduction

The FreeCAD interface is based on Qt, a well known graphical user interface toolkit, particularly used in Linux, but also available in Windows and MacOS.

File:FreeCAD interface base.png

Standard FreeCAD interface in 0.19.

Components of the interface

Like many pieces of software, FreeCAD includes a standard menu bar, and then a series of toolbars and panels where the user tools exist.

The standard menus are: File, Edit, View, Tools, Macro, Windows, Help.

The standard toolbars that appear in the interface are:

File toolbar: tools to work with files, open documents, copy, paste, undo and redo actions.
Workbench toolbar: tool to select the active workbench.
Macro toolbar: tools to record and execute macros.
View toolbar: tools to control how objects appear in the 3D view.
Structure toolbar: tools to organize objects in the document, and create links to additional documents.

The main panels that allow working with objects are:

3D view: the area where 2D and 3D geometry is drawn.
Combo view: the panel that contains the tree view, the task panel, and the property editor.
Tree view: the element that shows all objects in the document and their parametric history.
Task panel: the panel that shows different actions and options depending on the drawing tool selected.
Property editor: the place where object properties are modified.
Selection view: the panel that shows elements that are currently selected.
Report view: the text box that shows different messages from the application and its tools.
Python console: the editor that allows running Python code interactively to see results in the 3D view.
Status bar: the bar that shows certain messages from the application, and that has the mouse navigation selector.
DAG view: an alternative to the tree view, which shows the relationships between different objects through a graph.