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I made the selector handles inverse and tweaked their shapes a bit. Some of the colors of node edit and shape knots are also changed. Comments welcome.

I find the handles in CVS at present (2004-02-27) uglier than the blue handles in the usual case of white background. The one other person I've asked agrees.

Any other opinions? Everyone please speak up!

Can we change things such that on a white background things look as they used to?

Not unless I'm forced by popular vote, and in that case I'll have to patch my copy to have inversion anyway. Or implement handle styles so everybody could use what they like best.

You know, the point of having these hamdles is not so they are "beautiful". The point is that they are intuitive, immediately visible, and immediately recognizable. As a person who spends hours in Inkscape doing real design work, I am of the opinion that inversion helps immensely. At first I thought that the new handles are maybe a bit too bright and large, but after some time I grew to appreciate their visibility.

If the only non-white part of the background is overlap with thick black stroking (say 8--20 pt), then inversion is annoying (distracting) rather than helpful.

On the contrary, in such cases inversion helps me not lose track of the image. It just takes some getting used to - after some time your brain switches to the "inverse mode" and learns to abstract the handle and the background into different planes of perception, so they never obscure or damage each other.

Maybe try having a one-pixel-wide white border around the existing one-pixel-wide black border, and use semi-transparency rather than xor'ing.

You know, I've tried many coloring variants, including all kinds of borders, before I reluctantly set it to plain inversion. Reluctantly because most other apps use inversion too, and I hoped I could invent something smarter than most. Nope, it did not work. Any border immediately makes the handles look noisy (there's no AA) and overcomplex, and any color of their own damages the subconscious abstraction of the handles as something entirely different than the objects.

Besides, it is well known in design that transparency and fancy colors only work starting from some minimum size; in too small objects they only give you annoying "dirt". Small things must use bold simple colors (or inversion) to be visible and usable.

I'd guess that semi-transparency would be more real-world-like than xor'ing, and hence perhaps less distracting.

Being real-world-like is a good goal when you are drawing a real-world-like picture. When you are creating an _interface_ to help you draw pictures, however, the goal is different and in some aspects even opposite.

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