[snip]
- When moving objects, alt-drag now moves them without snapping, even if
the grid is enabled.
I like that. Except that on linux alt-drag often drags the window. A workaround is to start dragging first and press Alt while dragging.
Yes. Although it's not so bad because you already have to start dragging before pressing if you want to use Shift and Control. If you hold-shift-then-drag you get the start of a lassoo rectangle.
- When moving objects with the grid enabled, the current behaviour is to
snap the objects "snap points" to the grid. This patch adds an alternative behaviour on Shift-drag: moved objects are snapped such that they keep the offset from the grid that they had before the move.
I think this might be useful too... but it sounds like something pretty limited. I wonder if we can think up something more generally useful for shift-drag. Or maybe move "snapless drag" from Alt to Shift and leave Alt alone.
On reflection I think this may be a bad solution to the problem of grid snap not snapping to nodes. Once I've sorted that out I may well be able to remove this option. Then we could move snapless drag to Shift and leave Alt free for the WM.
- An option in Inkscape preferences to make (3) the default and the
current behaviour happen on Shift-drag.
I think we should just decide which way is better (or whether we need this behavior at all). Providing shortcut configurability for only one shortcut is confusing (why not others?).
OK. I added the option because I basically never want the current behaviour. So I'm itch scratching again. Hopefully this can go as well, in time.
Also, snapless drag also needs to be enabled for node tool, not only selector.
OK. Will do.
As for a bbox/nodes snapping configuration switch, on a second thought I think it might not be necessary. If you want your nodes to snap, you just switch to node tool and do it there. In node tool you can even move the entire object by its nodes - press Ctrl-A to select all nodes and drag any one. The only thing you cannot do in node edit is scaling (although this may become possible in the future, see RFE 910817), but for scaling, you usually want to restrict the overall bbox, so the current selector behavior is appropriate. Am I missing something?
I'm not keen on this at all. The node tool only lets you move single objects at a time. It only seems to work for paths, not for e.g. rectangles. It becomes a two-step process (select path, select all nodes) to get ready for a move-drag.
I'd much rather use the select tool, and have optional grid snap behaviours. I personally never want to snap to bboxes, but as long as someone else does I don't think there's too much of a problem making it optional. OTOH if everyone's just thinking "well someone probably wants snap-to-bbox", but no-one actually /does/, the option is superfluous and just pointless clutter.
Cheers
Carl