I found this on your site:
http://www.maths.tcd.ie/~horkana/inkscape/jasc-webdraw-tooltips.txt
I had somewhat forgotten about that...
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]
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). I think there is plenty of room to use those modifiers to overload the arrow keys to allow rotation. In case you had not already realised (and if you search the web it will become clear) that I very much appreciate having good default keybingdings for everything that can reasonably have a keybinding.
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'm sure we can figure out the best answer for the majority of users.
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).
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.
Sincerely
Alan Horkan