OpenSCAD is a script-only based modeller that uses its own description language; parts can be previewed, but cannot be interactively selected or modified by mouse in the 3D view.I installed it easily on my Fedora system via "dnf -y install openscad".
The following two Linux Journal articles from 2019 provide a nice introduction with a concrete example:
I am very pleased with this excellent tutorial, one of the best you will find anywhere on any topic:
The second tutorial also looks very good, but I have not yet spent any time with it.To output an STL file, you type F6 to render, then export to STL. I get a nice clean ascii STL file. Not only that it plays a nice musical sound when it does the render. So far so good.
OpenSCAD is unitless, but it behooves me to work in millimeters if I want Cura to properly handle the STL file I generate. Using OpenSCAD variables allows me to specify key values in inches and scale them by multiplying by 25.4 and this is working well for me.
Adventures in Computing / tom@mmto.org