On Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 1:16 PM, LucaDC <dicappello@...2144...> wrote:
Inkscape, with its wonderful "yes you can" mindset, has accommodated both, and it is just so happened historically that one way of use requires a modifier while the other does not. Deciding now that their order of importance is wrong and swapping that modifier would be a very weird thing to do - for Inkscape as a project.
And you are swapping.
No we don't. We give you a way to swap them if you so prefer.
Too much consistency may be bad sometimes.
I agree with you.
This is not about consistency. It's about accommodating different usage scenarios.
If you give me a preference to set and forget, that may be fine.
OK, so I count you as support :) Any other objectors?
Anyway I still consider this approach conceptually wrong as it's not up to Inkscape's programmers to decide what users should expect when pressing del.
This is a philosophical argument, but I still disagree. We do this *all the time*, and in other cases you likely make a lot of use of our "deciding for you". There's no clear-cut line between being smart and "too smart". We're always trying to be smart and anticipate the needs of users. It's just that in this case, we anticipated the needs of other users, not you - but now we're fixing it so you can easily use it as well :)
So many other programs already exibit a well known behaviour: why should Inkscape introduce a new one? Which clear and wide-accepted improvement does this add?
This has been discussed to death, I don't think we should go start a new cycle :)
P.S.: don't speak about zero length handlers, please, because a segment doesn't have handlers; a curve with a 0 length handler is a straight curve, not a segment; a curve with 0.00001 length handler is an "almost straight" curve, not a "quasi-segment". If you can't understand this you will probably never understand what we are speaking about.
I understand perfectly. And I have been hit many times by inexplicable stupidity of Inkscape and other programs which change behavior in drastic ways in response to accidental, unnoticed by the user, changes somewhere. In Inkscape, we're trying to eliminate such weirdness and make the continuum of behaviors smoothly differentiable (if you understand what I mean :)