I'm pretty sure I suggested these before, and if I'm not mistaken I was told there were some implementation problems. But I think these are really important, so here I go again, perhaps someone can come up with a technical solution.
I have some issues with the docked dialogs.
The first issue is that the dock status doesn't stick across sessions. I always have to re-open them whenever I start a new instance, open an existing file, etc. And in my work process, I always need the fill&stroke and the layers docks open, so I have to re-open the two docks and then adjust the size of the layers dialog (because by default it opens at only two layers height, even if there's a lot of free space to open it in a larger size). Is there no possibility of somehow keeping their status in the inkscape config or the specific file properties?
The second problem is the width of the docks. The fill&stroke is excessively large! I have a resolution of 1280X1024 and it still take a HUGE chunk of space. and all the widgets are so large you can barely fit two docked dialogs in the same screen. if you compare that to other applicaitons - Photoshop, BLender, Gimp - you'll see that usually widgets on graphic apps are smaller. This way an artist can keep many open dialogs and still have a large canvas to work on.
Lastly, is it possible to add a "layers" button to the main toolbar, to open the layers dialog? We have an "align" button and an "xml editor" button, I'm sure the layers dialog is important enough to also have a button.
Please forgive me if this is already being worked on for 0.47... thanks for your time and keep up the good work!
Michael