Bill Baxter wrote:
... Is there a way to hide everything but the current selection? Or to use outline rendering for everything but the current selection? I was playing around with editing the about.svg splash screen and with all the blurring going on rendering was very slow when zoomed in. Outline mode fixed the speed, but then it's hard to tell what the current thing I'm editing really looks like. Anyway more flexible control over the rendering quality seems like it would be useful. An intermediate between outline and full would be nice too. It would basically turn off expensive effects like blur and just do a simple color rendering.
Have you tried setting the filter quality lower? (It's in the Inkscape preferences.) That should help, it doesn't turn blur off, but it does make it considerably less expensive.