5 Selection of tools
5.1 Graphics
5.2 Geometry
blender: the most powerful 3D (in the general sense) open source modeling tool; allows geometries to be exported to STL, which is compatible with most meshing software.
FreeCAD: contrarily to blender, this is the most mature open source modeling tool in the technical sense. It supports both 3D conception and detailed drawing, among other features.
cadquery: a simple parametric geometry tool.
Salome: not just grometry, but also a large meshing toolbox provided by EDF.
5.3 Meshing
gmsh: the to-go meshing tool for 2D geometries and visualization of many formats of 3D meshes; before trying to produce reliable structured meshes and geometry in 3D some ninja skills need to be developed. Its own scripting language makes parametric meshing easy.
MeshLab: allows to manipulate triangulated grids generated in CAD; helpful for preparing patches for use with #OpenFOAM/snappyHexMesh.
5.4 Rendering
5.5 Simulation
Elmer: multiphysics FEM toolkit (see dedicated topic); download it here
OpenFOAM: general purpose FVM CFD toolkit (see dedicated topic).
TRUST Platform: the basis for TrioCFD code by CEA.
5.6 Productivity
Obsidian is the de facto solution for note-taking and second brain management, but it is not free for commercial ends and that has become a problem for my intended work use. Looking for alternatives for this tool which is my main productivity setting, I came across the following packages. Testing was done with I want it to be the same mindset and if after a few minutes I was not convinced by the application, it was automatically discarded. In summary, I liked both Joplin and Zettlr but will pursue the use of the latter only as Joplin does not meet by criteria. StandardNotes is a false open-source package and logseq is still too raw for any production setting.
| Software | Pros | Cons |
|---|---|---|
| laurent22/joplin | Rich interface with many features; excellent tool if you are not seeking version control as a target. Available as portable executable. | Counterintuitive interface and files are not directly stored as .md; file system synchronization requires and absolute path. After closing the executable, a process was kept alive. |
| logseq/logseq | Available as portable executable. | Poor UI at first sight. Fast but dumb in the sense it will only support one file with a given title, what is incompatible with my way of organizing directories. Pages are not organized as in the folder view. |
| standardnotes/app | Interface is cleaner/less cluttered than Joplin. Available as portable executable. | Stopped using it as received the first notification that smart tags require a paid plan. Also only plain text files are supported in free mode. |
| Zettlr/Zettlr | Support to YAML frontmatter. UI gets better as you open files. Integration to BibTeX. | Poor UI at first sight. Not available as portable executable; but installation can be done in any user folder, what is also fine. It took a long time to import my existing second brain and sometimes it glitches/has some lags. |
5.7 Other
- protobuf: for parsing #OpenFOAM dictionaries from Python.
The following are known to be installable in a portable fashion (but some of them might require some ingenious ways of preparing portable versions from official distributions).