On 10/26/2008 03:56 PM, A.J. Carter wrote:
How about holding down CTRL and then using TAB to cycle. As soon as CTRL is pressed the current cursor position would be 'locked' and it would cycle each time tab is pressed irregardless of how the mouse moves until CTRL is next released. This still only requires a single hand and so would still be reasonably elegant.
That looks quite awkward to me; I think most problems could be overcome by giving preference to nodes near the cursor combined with easily accessible toggles (being either icons, keys, or both).
In addition to holding down keys like N, E (as mentioned before) to provide a temporary over-ride to the global snap, I think an indicator of which snaps are globally active in the status bar may be useful.
That indicator should also be a toggle IMO. Maybe I will have a stab at this (and at cleaning up the snapping dialogs, long due too) within a few months, because it looks like most snapping bugs have been solved and the snapping code is settling down.
I've prepared a PDF mock up (using corel screenshots) of how this may work. I'm not sure how whether the mailing list handles attachments, so I will e-mail it directly to you. I wondered if it might be possible to place it online as a suggestion?
You could create a "blueprint" in Launchpad (see https://blueprints.launchpad.net/inkscape). I think that your proposal gives indeed excellent control for translations, but what about scaling and stretching? You're not using the handles for this, so how is Inkscape to know which transformation to use? BTW, perpendicular and tangent snapping will be difficult with our current mechanisms, but the other modes are either already there or easily implemented.
Diederik