Michael,
These are all good suggestions, but you need to submit them as RFEs to our tracker because otherwise they may be lost in the mailing list traffic. Some comments:
On 11/6/06, Michael Grosberg <preacher_public@...9...> wrote:
The layer window icons are not identical to those on the layer menu. While this makes Inkscape similar to Gimp, it also makes its own visual language inconsistent! I think Inkscape should be consistent with itself first. Plus, the layer icons on the menu are so much better looking.
I think there was some reason to make them different, but I don't remember it. Anyone?
I'd like to see menu items and keyboard shortcuts to globally turn snap on and off. Ideally, they should be similar to Adobe's (with the same keyboard shortcut), and placed in the "View" menu. Yes, these all exist in the document preferences, but I find I turn snap on and off a lot, even while working on a single path (imagine wanting to snap just one or two nodes here and there), and I see a need for something more useable than having a large floating dialog that takes a lot of screen space.
Certainly doable.
If you know AI shortcuts, please take time to review share/keys/adobe-illustrator.xml to make sure all shortcuts are listed there correctly in comments (if we don't yet have corresponding actions) or are assigned correct actions (otherwise). If you find an error or something that can be improved, submit your fixes. You can also take time to describe the not-yet-assigned Adobe shortcuts in comments - just a brief sentence on what each shortcut does (it's not always obvious!) so as to make it easier for the developers to create/match Inkscape actions for them.
(Of course this request is not only for Michael - anyone who knows Adobe Illustrator can help!)
Similarly, I'd also like to have menu items to toggle different snap modes on and off. They should be placed in a sub-menu right after the "snap" toggle, and the sub-menu labeled as "Snap To...". If the "global snap" mentioned above is turned off, then (as in Adobe products) these have no effect.
Also doable, file an RFE on that too.
Hiding and locking is not very easy right now. For example, I don't see a way to hide or lock multiple selections. There's a need for "Hide selected", "Lock selected", "Unhide All", "Unlock All" menu items in the "Object" menu. Possibly also "Hide" and "Lock" as right-click menu items.
While it's also doable, I'd like to point out that locking individual objects is not recommended currently. You're supposed to lock/unlock and hide/unhide layers, not objects. Is there a reason why this won't work for you?
Inkscape should remember all floating dialogs' show/hide status on exit so that if they were visible when Inkscape terminates, they are visible in the next session.
There's already a bug on that, but it will have to wait until the basic problems with dialogs-on-top are resolved.
"Swatches" should probably move from the "Object" menu to the "view" menu as they are not related to objects.
Agreed, I moved it to View and rearranged the View menu a bit.
I don't think the "Export Bitmap" dialog should switch between "Page", "Drawing" or "selection" when the selection is changed. In my experience, sometimes you export the entire page a number of times, while making small changes here and there. All the while, the export dialog automatically switches to "selection" whenever you do something and then switches back to "drawing". You have to return it to "drawing" all the time. I can see how the current setup is useful - when exporting multiple selections as multiple files - but I think the earlier use pattern I mentioned is more common. At least, a method to turn this behavior off should be supplied.
OK, let's formulate it that way: if the user has explicitly clicked on Page or Drawing, do not automatically switch it away from that. Please submit that to the RFE tracker.
When copying and pasting objects between files, stops in gradients should be automatically renamed so that objects don't accidentally receive the wrong gradient because of two different gradients in the two files having the same name. Yes, this happened to me a number of times!
That's a well-known long-standing problem which requires quite some rearchitecturing for solving it. It's already in our bug tracker.
The last one is an important bug fix for us Windows users: make all dialogs and tool windows float above the canvas. I remember this was done in Gimp about a year ago. I think it had something to do with the version of GTK used. I also remember seeing it as an open bug in some previous Inkscape version prior to release - what happened with that? Were there no volounteers found to fix it?
Another well-known problem. There's been some progress on that front recently, but we could really use some help from programmers familiar with GTK (contact me if you think you can help out).