Dear Diederik,
Many thanks for your comments. Regarding the TAB to cycle between snaps: as you say I can see that this may cause problems with predictability. 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.
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's indeed an elegant way to create some more flexibility. If however this is only to select what we snap _to_, then we could still use something that gives us more control of what we snap _from_. For the latter we could still use Johan's proposal.
In terms of selecting 'from' using snaps, the resizing handles of inkscape are already slightly outside the boundary of the object, so could regular snapping not be used to pick the item 'from' already somehow?
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?
Re: using tab to cycle through selections as you suggested - I agree that this would be very useful!
Kindest Regards, Alex
This brings me to some other point though: Hasn't any one ever thought of using the tab key to cycle through the items which are to be selected? Now we can use left-click and alt-left-click to select an item on the canvas, but this is still tricky when there are many overlapping items. Modern 3D CAD programs show a list of all available items near the mouse pointer when left-clicking, through which the user can cycle with the tab key, including highlighting on canvas! Now wouldn't that be cool too?
Diederik