I've been working with Inkscape a lot lately, and while it was mostly a lot of fun, I could think of a number of small changes that could make Inkscape even better. Most of them seem to not be so difficult to implement as far as I can tell. I'm not sure if this is the right place, but I didn't want to just post a bunch of enhancement requests - I'd rather get some user and developer feedback first.
So, here's my list:
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
"Swatches" should probably move from the "Object" menu to the "view" menu as they are not related to objects.
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.
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!
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?
I'd like to hear your feedback, especially developers!
Michael