On Mon, Feb 8, 2010 at 10:54 AM, LucaDC <dicappello@...2144...> wrote:
Will the above suggestion - do not extend handles if there's no curvilinearity in the result - work for you?
Unfortunately not. What I (only me?) need is the old behaviour so when you delete a node from a rectangle it becomes a triangle. Now the _only_ way to have this (which I consider a very intuitive and expected result) is using ctrl-del.
But it's still possible, by only one extra key :)
I'm not trying to imply that your usage scenarios are not realistic. They are. I'm just trying to show that the other scenarios are realistic too. 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. However, for a specific user it would be natural, and as much as I hate adding prefs, I would not object to placing a "Swap behavior of Del and Ctrl+Del" checkbox in Node tool prefs. Will that work for you (and others)?
An example: you have a folder with all your photos named 'photo0001', 'photo0002', ... up to 'photo0254'. 'photo0127' is really ugly so you delete it and automatically you have all other files renamed to -1 by your super-clever OS (!) so 'photo0128' is now 'photo0127' and 'photo0254' is 'photo0253', so there are no "numeric holes". Logical, isn't it?
This is actually a very good example for understanding our different approaches. For you, each of these files is a unique photo that you want to keep its unique name and place. But for me, they are just *frames in a movie*, and when I delete some single frames, I would really like my video editor to shift and interpolate all other frames in order to avoid jerks and keep correct timing. I don't even care that some of the automatically interpolated frames would look a bit weird - at 25 frames a second this won't be noticeable.
See? You do photography, I do video. Both are valid uses of Inkscape :)