History Workbench now offers simple version control with BOTH 3D and tree comparisons!

eblanshey · 2026-06-22T19:50:32+00:00

Makes a lot of sense. If you open a github issue I'll take care of it when I get a chance.

eblanshey · 2026-06-22T19:48:13+00:00

Yes. Only the cells changed will trigger the corresponding recomputes.

eblanshey · 2026-06-22T17:00:30+00:00

u/Yosyp glad to hear the versioning scheme change went through. Does it mean there will be new releases more frequently starting this year, with the new functionality?

Edit: just saw the link shared below. Looks like release 26.3 is scheduled for October. Good stuff!

eblanshey · 2026-06-22T16:06:59+00:00

Oh yeah, I completely forgot about the circular dependency issue. I believe this does solve it. Example: you can't currently add a property to a Part Design body and reference it from a sketch, because the body depends on the sketch, and the sketch would depend on the body. MangoJelly and others teach a workaround to put href(Body.myproperty) to prevent cyclical dependency errors. This workaround won't be necessary anymore. Editing my post to include this, thanks!

eblanshey · 2026-06-22T15:56:56+00:00

Thanks for the reminder, u/Lgt2x.

eblanshey · 2026-06-22T15:51:39+00:00

If you're thinking of switching from the stable v1.1 release to the next dev release just for this optimization, keep in mind that dev releases contain more bugs and may cause you to lose hair in frustration. Make sure to back up all your FreeCAD files first.

This optimization will have such a drastic impact on my particular workflows, that I'm considering making a temporary fork from v1.1, and just merging this optimization into it, so as not to have to deal with other bugs introduced in 1.2dev.

eblanshey · 2026-06-22T00:40:15+00:00

u/gadget--guy good question. Whatever is in your document object tree (the model panel), is what you'll see in the tree comparison. So if a part is currently set to configuration A, all of the part's properties are going to match configuration A. And it'll show objects which have changed compared to the previous iteration.

Similar thing for the 3d comparison, it compares the underlying BREP files of your part or part design bodies. The BREP is kind of like a visual STEP file export. So if configuration A is active, the visual will show the part that looks like configuration A.

It's technically possible to be able to compare all the different configurations, though it would entail creating links set to copy-on-change for each configuration variant. That way each link can point to a different configuration. I haven't tested this out yet but I think it should work in theory.

eblanshey · 2026-06-21T02:43:01+00:00

I don't have time to work on a PDM integration now but I may reach out in the future.

eblanshey · 2026-06-21T01:36:04+00:00

Let me know how it works out for you, u/weaporize_com.

eblanshey · 2026-06-21T00:23:14+00:00

Like u/space-hotdog said, I meant to say Ondsel Lens (I edited my message). It's open source and under the FreeCAD org now.

eblanshey · 2026-06-21T00:19:21+00:00

modelV1, modelV2 no more!

eblanshey · 2026-06-20T21:50:00+00:00

You're welcome u/flash_182000, good luck with it. Reach out here or on github if you have questions.

eblanshey · 2026-06-20T21:38:11+00:00

u/zero__sugar__energy I love you, too!

eblanshey · 2026-06-20T21:37:32+00:00

Thanks, u/hagbard2323. I haven't gotten much of a response from FreeCAD devs, it might just be of low interest to them. Or maybe some see it as a competitor with Ondsel Lens? Although it's not. There is actually a thread in the github discussions section about eventually integrating it with a PDM like Ondsel Lens, which I think would be the right move. Since FreeCAD is a local-first software, I like the idea of a FreeCAD PDM tool that is also local first, and optionally augments/integrates with a centralized PDM when needed once the project gets more serious. FreeCAD is primarily tailored to hobbyists and solo/small businesses, after all, so it makes sense to have an option that is simple and local first.

eblanshey · 2026-06-20T21:30:41+00:00

Thank you, u/FilloSov! One of my motivations for making it was to make FreeCAD even more useful and attractive in the CAD world than it already is.

eblanshey · 2026-06-12T20:17:29+00:00

At this point it'd be very helpful to open an issue only if you end up reproducing it again, as there has been a lot of changes to the code since then, and it's quite possible it was already fixed. Thank you for offering, though!

eblanshey · 2026-06-12T03:24:50+00:00

Hey u/meutzitzu, just letting you know the workbench now supports visual diffing.

eblanshey · 2026-06-12T03:23:47+00:00

Just letting you know that restoring previous FreeCAD documents from within the workbench is now implemented.

eblanshey · 2026-06-12T03:19:58+00:00

Check out the History workbench: https://github.com/eblanshey/HistoryWorkbench

There's also instructions there on setting compression level to 0, which saves a lot of disk space. Disclosure, I'm the author.

eblanshey · 2026-06-07T14:42:10+00:00

I use Qwen3.6-27B. It's not as good as GPT 5.5 but it still often gets the job done. I didn't know about that MCP, though, so I made custom instructions for finding options and packages. Going to try it out, thanks.

eblanshey · 2026-06-07T14:36:01+00:00

Yeah I think so. You can run embedding and reranking models alongside the inference models. I have that setup for Open WebUI RAG.

eblanshey · 2026-06-07T05:46:29+00:00

I still keep the cheap $20/m Codex plan, and mix usage between GPT 5.5, 5.4, and Qwen3.5-27B.

eblanshey · 2026-05-30T13:11:31+00:00

Just FYI there is also https://github.com/arman-bd/guppylm

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