the star, and maybe a polygon tool of some sort for n-th sided polygons.
I've been meaning to suggest that it would be useful to have a Polygon as well as a "Star" Tool (pentagram, poly* => Polygram?). It brings the feature closer to the user, easier to discover and use even and worth the slight repitition.
You can create a polygon with the star tool now, if you use node edit to move the two control points together. However it's a good idea to provide a shortcut for that action, I will add it to TODO.
If the current spiral tool does not do enough to be interesting to you and you want ways to make it more poweful/usefull I am linking to an example file (svg and png) and a screenshot of the Spiral Tool from Jasc Web Draw which has lots of options (curved or flat sides, number of turns, number of rotations, linear or logarithmic expansion etc).
All of these options, with the exception of flat-sided spirals, are possible with Inkscape. It's even more flexible: instead of choosing between linear and logarithmic only, it allows you to set the expansion value precisely (both above and below 1, with 1 being linear), and you can vary the number of rotations interactively on the canvas (switch to node edit). Overall, it's a very good tool. Although the flat-sided spirals would be nice to have too.
Although I keep mentioning Jasc Web Draw I have to say that it is a flawed program missing all kinds of details but I do think it contains a few fresh ideas and I will try and take more screenshots. I probably shouldn't speculate like this but I'd really like to see a stable Inkscape 1.0.0 [1] declared this side of six months and give them a run for their money! here are those links.
I found this on your site:
http://www.maths.tcd.ie/~horkana/inkscape/jasc-webdraw-tooltips.txt
I must say that arrow keys moving is already much more powerful in Inkscape (both by pixels and by fixed increments), while using arrow keys for rotating objects is a very stupid idea, imho. Arrow keys just don't stand for rotation. I'm now implementing a comprehensive set of shortcuts for rotation using [ and ] keys with various modifiers.
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