Beside maintenance and customer support, LAStools will certainly need some updates and further development to remain competitive. We are currently working on the following tasks.
New GUI
LAStools is a fundamental element regarding LiDAR data processing, but the GUI is outdated. Young professionals require a more intuitive operation. Visualizing cloud points helps to understand about data and processing. We‘ve started to develop a new GUI wrapper. It‘s challenging, but certain parts are already running.

Linux
Compiling the open-source part of LAStools is quite easy and done by many users. The commercial part is more difficult to port due to various dependencies and the complexity of the code. Nevertheless, most of it is done. The binaries are too big to pack them into our regular releases. If you are interested in running the commandline version of LAStools in a native Linux environment, kindly contact us to join our Linux beta tester program.
Manuals
LAStools are basically commandline tools optimized for batch processing. The „–help“ output and the *_README.txt files of each tool provide basic information. Additionally, there is a lot of information (forums, videos) that is not easy to find, especially for initial users. Our aim is to collect the scattered information and elaborate a user manual for each tool. Together with our tutorials, this results in a complete documentation of LAStools.
We look forward to your feedback and are always open for requests.
Thanks, we currently use Lastools in linux using an emulator (Wine) and
are very interested in beta testing the native linux version.
Kind regards,
The new development focus looks exciting. I hope performance over all else will remain top priority. I’ve seen alot of good programs get bogged down because of bloated front ends.
Respectfully,
George S. Mercier
Having a native Linux port of the complete set of tools is a great step forward. The windows-centric development was just insufficient and much too limited. I have been compiling the open-source tools on several Linux platforms as well as on macOS, but having the complete set would available would be fantastic. It opens lastools up for deployments in cloud environments (AWS, Azure, OCI …).
Same for having comprehensive manuals. While blogs and mailing lists are a great help, they are not easy to search for answers.
Albert Godfrind
Nice! I was afraid LAStools would be abandoned, but this looks very promising.