On Wed, 2010-09-01 at 15:51 -0400, hendrik@...2611... wrote:
When I use inkscape (or the Gimp for that matter) there's very little effective drawing area because most of the screen seems to fill up with icons to do various things to my drawing. Is there any way to reduce the clutter, and to see them only when I need them? Or to usually see only the ones I use often?
F11 to toggle full-screen and F12 to show/hide panels might help a bit.
View -> Show/Hide allows you to hide rulers and scrollbars (there are shortcuts for both).
Hide the palette, if you don't work with predefined colors.
My solution for GIMP is taking advantage of the focus-follows-mouse behavior, combined with auto-raise (no delay), that I configured the window manager to do. The window manager hints in GIMP preferences must be on "Normal". I then use the toolbox with some tabbed panels on the left side, layers and co on the right. If I work on a large image, I resize its window to cover much of the other windows at the sides. A quick flick of the mouse will bring either of it to the front immediately and just moving back to the image window will raise it again.