2009/7/17 Vladimir Savic <vladimir.firefly.savic@...400...>:
I might be too late, [...]
It is never too late in open source software. :-) However, I'd like to hear other people's opinions on this before implementing it because I've used Inkscape very little for real production work lately so that I feel I can't thoroughly judge usability questions.
but it seems to me that we will have more consistent behavior if we follow existing keybinding of other tools. For example, here is what "Inkscape keyboard and mouse reference" says,
*Ctrl+Alt+mouse drag - move along handles* This restricts movement to the directions of the node's handles, their continuations and perpendiculars (total 8 snaps).
Ignoring rotation part, Ctrl+Alt will, with this modification, still move handle point along (guide) line.
This small change would make behavior of somehow similar tools (to some extent), well, similar. The only difference would be Shift becoming from
- no-snap modifier to - rotate modifier.
I'm not sure if I understood the last paragraph correctly. Just to make sure, your suggestion is to use Ctrl+Alt instead of Ctrl for moving the anchor along the guide, right? Frankly, I'm not convinced. If we implement this change then the Ctrl modifier (whithout Alt) will be unused. Firstly, this forces the user to unnecessarily press a second modifier to obtain constrained movement, which is cumbersome, and secondly, it makes the feature a little less discoverable. In the Node tool the Ctrl modifier alone also has a certain meaning, and it is also related to constrained movement (as is generally the case in Inkscape), so my personal opinion is that the analogy is still there and we should leave it as it is. But I'm open to different opinions. What do other people think?
Max