Free CAD Toolkit for macOS

Problem context

Free CAD workflows on macOS usually fail in a few concrete places: Homebrew Cask apps are quarantined by Gatekeeper and exit with SIGKILL; LibreCAD defaults to English; DWG drawings from newer AutoCAD versions do not open reliably; and brew can hit permission errors. LibreCAD has limited DWG support, especially for AC1018 and later, while FreeCAD covers 2D/3D parametric work but is not an AutoCAD-like 2D drafting tool. This skill targets those local failures rather than giving a general CAD overview.

How the skill works

It organizes the workflow around LibreCAD, FreeCAD, and ODA File Converter: identify the target tool and file version, then fix local runtime issues. Gatekeeper remediation focuses on the com.apple.quarantine flag and broken code signatures, and applies to any blocked Homebrew Cask app. Localization work emphasizes writing defaults with the runtime Bundle ID, not the placeholder identifier in Info.plist. For DWG compatibility, it uses version-code signals: older files may be tried as DXF, while newer files should be batch converted to DXF with ODA before importing into LibreCAD.

Boundary

This is a local operations and file conversion workflow, not a CAD modeling or team collaboration system. LibreCAD is best for 2D drafting, FreeCAD for parametric modeling, and LibreCAD 2.2.1 is deprecated in Homebrew, so future availability may depend on other channels. ODA must be downloaded from its site under a license; converted DXF files display Chinese text, annotations, layers, and hatches more reliably.