The usability of the font family drop-down list in the Text tool controls bar has been improved: it no longer steals focus, all keyboard shortcuts work as designed (Alt+X to access the family control, Alt+down to open the drop-down list, arrows to move in the list, Enter to set chosen font) and the completion feature works (start typing a family name and a pop-up list with possible completions appears). Remaining problems that may be fixed in the future versions:
* The first opening of the drop-down list of family names may be slow if you have many fonts installed (the delay is Inkscape generating the previews for all fonts).
* By default on Linux, the drop-down is shown as a menu (gray background, wide panel without horizontal scrolling) instead of a list (white background, narrow panel with horizontal scrolling). The menu style is inconvenient because of its excessive width. To fix this, find your ~/.gtkrc-2.0 file and inside the style that applies to all widgets, add GtkComboBox::appears-as-list = 1. For example:
style "user-font" { font_name="DejaVu Sans 10" GtkComboBox::appears-as-list = 1 } widget_class "*" style "user-font"
Windows version uses the list style by default.
I should add that, after several days of tweaking this, starting from a patch by Felipe, I hate GTK more than ever. Its inconsistent behavior across platforms, poor configurability (can anyone please suggest how the list style can be set programmatically, not via an rc file? this style property is read-only in GTK!) and ambiguous documentation are really a shame. In the end I fixed everything except the above listed issues, using a few weird tricks but nothing really insane (standard GTK widgets only), and I think it should be good enough to release in 0.47. If and when someone comes up with a more advanced solution, it must be at least as good usability-wise as this one.
I tested it on Linux with GTK 2.15.4 and on Windows XP. Please report any problems to me, listing your platform and GTK version.