The more I learn about the SVG spec, the more I understand the rationale of some of the UI decisions inkscape made, and the more impressed I am by how they implemented advanced techniques like shape union and intersection, clipping and masking.
I love Inkscape. I’ve been using it for 20 years. But it boggles my mind how it’s still so horribly laggy on macOS. At least they got rid of the Xquartz dependency though.
Is there an OS it's not horribly laggy on? Last time I used it you couldn't even get previews of things when you dragged them around, it would just degrade to a bounding box. Heaven forbid you have a scene with any complexity.
Every time I see an Inkscape update I skim it for "massive performance upgrades" and am invariably disappointed. Inkscape doesn't need features, it needs to not lag for 5 seconds when I open a menu, it needs to run at 100+fps when I'm editing paths.
EDIT: I installed the latest version (under W10) and while it doesn't degrade to bounding boxes it's still like 10fps and it leaves trailing copies of the item being dragged around the canvas while I'm dragging. Really disappointing.
Can't say about Windows but on Linux - it works flawlessly since ages.
Just installed under Arch and while performance is better and there are no solitaire style copy-trails when I drag stuff it's still like 15-20fps when I'm dragging even a simple shape around while Illustrator manages 170fps without issue even with complex nested groups.
It's laggy on windows. On linux it works great.
The one new feature in 1.4 that I appreciated the most is the ability to disable anti-aliasing when exporting from the command line:
https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/merge_requests/5167
Before this option appeared in Inkscape nightly builds, I had no way of automating a pipeline to rasterize SVGs into black&white PNGs in a pixel perfect way.
Unfortunately 1.4 does not fix command palette issues on Windows (5+ seconds to show, freezes, crashes, several commands accessible through UI buttons not available through palette with same name phrase). Finding the name of an action and how to trigger it (button somewhere or menu/submenu item) is a pain point in Inkscape and a good command palette can help a lot.
I've just bought a Surface Pro tablet. Does Inkscape interface work well in a tablet or with a pen?
Some operations are best with keyboard (i.e. moving, zooming, panning, duplicating, acessing panels) and you need modifier keys quite often. You can map one or two to the stylus buttons, but that may not be sufficient
Have they added any method of setting a tool style before drawing, rather than adjusting style after drawing?
It's always fun to set up your font, then write some text and realize it's in the wrong font and all your work was lost