lisscad 0.2.0

CAD in Lissp

lisscad is a library for generating OpenSCAD code from Lissp scripts.

Don’t worry! You’re not supposed to track all the parentheses yourself. With an automatic formatter like parinfer, Lissp is easier than Python.

Features

• The terseness of Lisp.
• The usability of Lisp. For example, with the -<>> “thread-through” macro of Lissp, you can code for OpenSCAD operations in the order that they will be executed, instead of the order they have in OpenSCAD scripts.
• The lisscad package is executable on the command line to manage CAD projects. This includes support for tracking a project with inotify to re-render work in progress.
• Boilerplate is minimal and explicit. It takes one line in CAD scripts to import lisscad, and one line to transpile to OpenSCAD. Both of these and a Git repo are included in a template for new projects.
• Most of lisscad is pure, type-annotated Python 3.10+. It can be used without the Lissp layer. Conversely, you can use any Python code from Lissp.

The data model is based on dataclasses, not object-oriented Python. Pydantic handles type conversions for you in the back end.

See also the goals of the project.

Installation

On Linux:

pip install lisscad

At minimum, you also need OpenSCAD, which you must install separately. There are several ways to do that. For example:

sudo snap install openscad

Conveniences built into lisscad assume that you also have nohup and git installed.

Editor integration

Lissp is not a common dialect, so you may need to inform your text editor that it is Lisp. For example, if you are using Neovim, you can add the following to ~/.config/nvim/init.vim:

au BufRead,BufNewFile *.lissp             setfiletype lisp

For Vim, only the file path is different (~/.vimrc). parinfer-rust is an excellent Lisp autoformatter for Vim, Neovim, and other editors.

Usage

Command-line interface

To start a new project:

lisscad new myproject
cd myproject

The shape of your model(s) is defined by main.lissp. Edit it. To render your project to OpenSCAD once, run the normal Lissp compiler:

lissp main.lissp

To render a 3D model all the way to STL, pass a CLI argument via the Lissp compiler with --:

lissp main.lissp -- -r
lissp main.lissp -- --render  # Equivalent long option.

To view the most recently transpiled model in the OpenSCAD GUI:

lisscad view

To automatically transpile to OpenSCAD each time you edit main.lissp, so that the GUI always shows the current version:

lisscad track

Scripting interface

The vocabulary of lisscad is very similar to that of OpenSCAD. However, some function signatures have been adjusted to reduce the overall complexity of the interface.

• Example: lisscad’s cube is centred by default, because sphere is centred in both OpenSCAD and lisscad.
• Example: If you want to use a keyword argument to define an angle, it’s named angle; it doesn’t vary.

For maximum fidelity to OpenSCAD, use the lisp prelude:

(lisscad.prelude.._macro_.lisp)

(translate '(1 0) (square '(2 3)))

lisscad gives you the option of consistency with standard geometric and English terms instead. For example, in its english prelude, lisscad has a square function that draws squares, and a rectangle function that draws rectangles.

(lisscad.prelude.._macro_.english)

(right 1 (rectangle '(2 3)))

When you run lisscad new, you get a version of the english prelude called english-util. Named on a single line, this prelude combines the vocabulary of english with a set of higher-level utilities built into lisscad.

For the use of operators like +, see here.

History

lisscad is loosely patterned after scad-clj, ported from Clojure to another dialect of Lisp. The new dialect, and lisscad itself, are implemented in Python. This makes lisscad comparable to numerous Python-based OpenSCAD generators/transpilers, including SolidPython, SolidPy, openpyscad, pycad, py2scad, py-scad and pyscad.

lisscad was started to combine the best of its two ancestries: The simplicity and elegance of a Lisp similar to Clojure, and the JVM-free accessibility and startup time of Python. One notable difference is that whereas scad-clj uses hash tables as an implementation detail in its intermediate data model, and SolidPython has its own object-oriented data model, lisscad uses Pydantic dataclasses.

Legal

Copyright (C) 2022–2025 Viktor Eikman

lisscad is licensed as detailed in the accompanying file COPYING.md.