I must say that arrow keys moving is already much more powerful in
Inkscape
(both by pixels and by fixed increments), while using arrow keys for rotating objects is a very stupid idea, imho. Arrow keys just don't
stand
for rotation. I'm now implementing a comprehensive set of shortcuts for rotation using [ and ] keys with various modifiers.
[clearly i need to build and use InkScape a whole lot more and not be so badly uninformed about how things like the spiral tool work, but the machine i use for most of the day and write my email on has a fairly minimal selection of software]
With regard to shortcuts, you can consult
http://inkscape.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?KeyboardShortcuts
which I keep up-to-date as I add more shortcuts.
I'd need to think about it some more but I don't think using the arrow keys
- modifier for rotation is such a terrible idea but I'll wait and see (I
may well be wrong).
There are 2 rotation directions, but 4 arrow keys. Confusing.
I think there is plenty of room to use those modifiers to overload the arrow keys to allow rotation.
In fact, almost all possible modifiers are already used - see the wiki page. Ctrl-arrows pan the canvas; shift, alt, and shift-alt move objects.
However if you want to do things with [ and ] you will definately need to at least check the AZERTY keyboard layout and perhaps others to make sure that it is not too awkward to use those keys.
I think no matter where these keys are located (provided they are present at all), they are logical enough for this function.
Even if you do decide to use different keys it would certainly be nice to be able to move things by 1 pixels and N pixels increments (the N pixels is configurable not just fixed to 10 which i realised after writing the aformentioned notes).
The 10 multiplier may be made configurable, but I don't see much sense in that. It's like coins: you can pay any amount if you have 10-cent and 1-cent coins.
Thanks for the reply, I am very glad that you are also interested in providing users with keyboard accelerators for most functionality and I think it is a very good idea to have default keybinding for almost everything.
Yes, that seems to be my speciality in Inkscape :)
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