I was just editing some paths in Inkscape and found myself wanting to add a circle to the path.

Admittedly I could achieve this right now, fairly simply, just by creating a circle separately, converting it to a path, and then using "Combine paths" to combine both paths.

But that's a bit of a process, and it requires switch modes a number of times, and finding a few commands hidden in the menus (or knowing the keyboard shortcuts). If I could just click on the circle tool, and draw a circle which was automatically combined with the current path I'm editing, that would save a lot of time. Presumably if I could do it for circles, I could do the same for any shape.

One of the most useful scenarios for such a feature is editing clipping paths -- I love how you can edit them directly these days. But to combine any shapes with clipping paths, I currently have to release the clip, do the Combine, then set the clip again. That's sometimes a bit annoying.

Of course, sometimes you want to intersect/subtract/add, etc, and then you'd need to go through the process. But for a simple combine, this seems fairly intuitive.

I'm not proposing to do it myself (sorry!), but does anyone have any comments on how hard/useful this feature idea would be?

- Bryan