In a past career, I was a mechanical design engineer; I’ve probably spent 10,000 hours of my life in SolidWorks. Not once did I feel like a 3d mouse would speed me up or otherwise solve my problems. I trialed a spacepilot for several months and just couldn’t be arsed after awhile. What do others get out of them?
I don’t have as many hours in SolidWorks but for me, trying to navigate without a 3d mouse feels like riding a bike with square tires. I could manage to do it but why. At the end of the day though it’s a preference. Likewise I have to murder the x and y axis on it for things to click in my head, which is another preference. I suppose growing up as a gamer may have something to do with that. I don’t want to move/rotate the object, I want to move/rotate the camera…
I also prefer to move the camera, which a mouse is more intuitive for. A 3d mouse is like holding/rotating the object. A middle mouse button is so freaking simple and fast I just don’t understand the problem. Moving the view around is like 2% of my workflow.
And scroll up has to be zoom in. The fact that many defaults are the opposite is literally insane.
Weird, last time I used it with nixos running KDE under wayland. Worked without complaint.
The only problem was, that the service did not start (or wasn’t there). You had to open a terminal and manually type in sudo spacenavd. After that, everything else was plug and play.
Does it support 3D mice?
In a past career, I was a mechanical design engineer; I’ve probably spent 10,000 hours of my life in SolidWorks. Not once did I feel like a 3d mouse would speed me up or otherwise solve my problems. I trialed a spacepilot for several months and just couldn’t be arsed after awhile. What do others get out of them?
I don’t have as many hours in SolidWorks but for me, trying to navigate without a 3d mouse feels like riding a bike with square tires. I could manage to do it but why. At the end of the day though it’s a preference. Likewise I have to murder the x and y axis on it for things to click in my head, which is another preference. I suppose growing up as a gamer may have something to do with that. I don’t want to move/rotate the object, I want to move/rotate the camera…
I also prefer to move the camera, which a mouse is more intuitive for. A 3d mouse is like holding/rotating the object. A middle mouse button is so freaking simple and fast I just don’t understand the problem. Moving the view around is like 2% of my workflow.
And scroll up has to be zoom in. The fact that many defaults are the opposite is literally insane.
yes
You can even run some of them under linux with this driver: https://github.com/FreeSpacenav/spacenavd
Keep in min that this sw only supports x, not w/ Wayland. Chk the ticket for detail
Weird, last time I used it with nixos running KDE under wayland. Worked without complaint.
The only problem was, that the service did not start (or wasn’t there). You had to open a terminal and manually type in
sudo spacenavd. After that, everything else was plug and play.