I want to do something akin to what I've done in apps like Illustrator and Visio. For those, one big convenience is being able to define "custom" objects [e.g., if you're doing a floor plan, you have things like outlines of tables, chairs, etc] What I would like to do [don't laugh..:o)] is make crochet charts. They look like this:

They're pretty awful to do by hand, and there are tools that do it but very badly. Inkscape can easily do the kinds of things you need for that sort of thing.

What I'd like to do is "predefine" all of the different stitch graphics, and the be able to drag-and-drop them easily into the graphic. I know how to do paths and such and I can make the various stitches and my plan a for doing this is to have on inkscape drawing that has only the various stitches in it. Then when I start another, I can open a second screen and copy the various glyphs over into the new screen as I need them. But what would be cool would be to somehow load that little "library of glyphs" in Inkscape so I could do everything in just one window and in one drawing directly.

If not, that's OK: the two-pane solution works. I was just wondering if there might be a trick to be able to drag-and-drop the new glyphs.