I'm looking forward to learning CadQuery and I'm happy to learn constraint solver capability exists. It may be experimental, and it may yet prove to be as frustrating as its FreeCAD counterparts, but knowing it exists gives me a goal to learn enough CadQuery to get there. As part of that journey I thought I would take another attempt at getting its default GUI tool CQ-editor up and running.

On my first pass, I followed instructions to install CadQuery components in a Python virtual environment then installed CQ-editor as an add-on within that Python virtual environment. Sadly I only got into an useless state where I could launch CQ-editor but nothing ever showed on screen. Did I make a mistake somewhere? Or is this a bug? I had no diagnostic feedback. Very FreeCAD-like, and not a great start! At least I could get Jupyter working in that Python virtual environment, so I had something.

Re-reading CadQuery installation instructions again, I noticed there was a standalone installer for CQ-editor. So instead of installing CadQuery as a collection of Python libraries then installing CQ-editor as a consumer of those libraries, we have an installer more along the line of standard desktop software installer. Which in this case means installing CQ-editor and pulling in CadQuery as its dependency.

Wary of the possibility that this installer may go sour and collide with what I have running (it is just a "nightly" build and not an official release) I decided to try it on a virtual machine first. I spun up a new VM with Proxmox and booted it into a network installer for Debian. For most experiments that is enough, as I can remotely control the machine via a command line using SSH. But CQ-editor is a graphical interface tool and my main machine runs Windows 11 so I wanted to access its graphical interface via Microsoft's Remote Desktop Protocol.

This is a job xrdp. Multiple tutorials exist on the internet for more details (example) but the succinct note for my future self is:

  • Install the component with sudo apt install xrdp

  • Give xrdp user permission to access SSL resources (to establish RDP connection) with sudo adduser xrdp ssl-cert

  • Restart xrdp so it can access its new SSL permissions with sudo systemctl restart xrdp

  • Verify it is back up and running with sudo systemctl status xrdp

This procedure allowed me to connect to this fresh virtual machine via "Remote Desktop Connection" application from my Windows machine, and I could follow instructions for CQ-editor standalone installer without any issue. And this time, when I launched CQ-editor, I saw its interface on screen come up and I could use it. Fantastic! I now have that option in addition to the Jupyter interface so I could play with both. I'm happy to have these tools at hand as I dive into CadQuery primer.