What's an addon and why do I suddenly want to waste
spend my time creating and maintaining it for eternity
or at least until I get bored of it?
Well, they allow you to mess with FreeCAD in whatever way
you can imagine as long as you can code it or if you are of
the practical sort, help you improve your workflow's synergy.
Here are few of the things you can do with addons.
-
Create a Preference Pack to show everyone
how FreeCAD should have actually looked like.
-
Add additional tools into existing workbenches
so you can finally have a button that randomly
colors parts, oh wait that already exists.
-
You can create support for importing / exporting
cursed file formats to give people a real scare. -
If you can convince your superiors you might be
able to spend the rest of your life working on a
custom workbench that does so much it might
as well be a standalone program.
You might wonder how they work and that is a great
question we will not cover here, at least not in detail.
All you need or want to know is that you can write an
addon with Python - technically C++ but don't ask me
me how - and it makes FreeCAD do your bidding.
That is, as long as the API supports it. Sorry to break
it to you but some things just aren't exposed in Python.
You can of course submit a PR to FreeCAD core and fix
it if that happens, but you will likely just work around it.
If you choose the sane way of interfacing through Python
you will want to have typing support for FreeCAD's API.
Lucky for you, some people outside FreeCAD thought of
that and created a neat PyPi stubs Package that covers at
least some of the API.
Why 'some of the API', that's a long story, but let's just say
4 different mixes of type declarations in FreeCAD & regexes.
Some work is being done to improve this, but that will
likely take a Short While™ until it's in a usable state.
Work in progress,
To be continued ..