I use regularly Inkscape, and it has been a constant source of frustration. The UI is the exact opposite of how I expect things to work.
It's improving at breakneck speed though. 1.2 already solved some of my frustrations (the new interface for linecaps & line dots, amazing!)
Almost all the features in this release seem to solve a major frustration I had with Inkscape.
* The node deletion behavior, it was so annoying, how you delete a node on a straight line and suddenly you get some soup.
* The awful color palette. You had to manually edit text files to get your own palettes, couldn't edit them in Inkscape. I, in fact, never managed to create a custom palette. Pinned colors seem to solve this.
* Lasso selection. It was soo fiddly to select a group of nodes. One missclick and you had to start from scratch, clicking on the tinny controls.
* Multithreaded rendering. The single-threaded software renderer is a misery for complex projects, or just zooming in. Now Inkscape is going to be 12 times faster on my machine
* Font selection was utter garbage, the new UI seems promising
* Patterns was also a constant source of frustration, looks like this release improves it.
This is exciting. I'm looking forward to use this new release.
Now please give me a dialog for key rebinding, similar to Krita. And better key binding discoverability.
Inkscape also has an experimental OpenGL backend that seems fairly stable. When I tested it, it seemed pretty stable and glitchless. I hope it will replace the Cairo backend soon, since OpenGL will give Inkscape even MORE performance!
As for discoverability (of keyboard shortcuts as well as commands), few versions back Inkscape introduced `View > Command Palette`, by default bound to "`?`" key:
It allows you to search for command by name and "tooltip description" and displays their assigned shortcuts. This is IMO the one of the few recent features that should be implemented in all applications. In Inkscape it is not as smooth as in IDEs, has somewhat slow first run, but I'm super glad it is even there.
The UI is garbage. It's like GIMP. I'm more than happy to pay for software especially when it has a well designed (user first) UI. It is not only the UI, it is the UX generally. It's weird and nerdy and thinks it must be "better" somehow.
I bit the bullet and put many hours into it and came away finding it fine. I almost entirely use key commands, just I like I did with Illustrator. Maybe that's why I find it acceptable. I no longer wish I was using Illustrator.
Whats bothering you about it? I probably lack perspective because I haven't used other software, but I'm really happy using both for whenever I need to do something.
translation: the UI is not exactly like im used to, and is not a duplicate of the product I wish to replace with another product for [reasons], therefore the world must know that it is garbage
Inkscape really is one of my favorite piece of software.
The new features are almost all things that I have wished Inkscape had dozens of times.
Font collections (the font menu is slow when you have to go through half of it to find the font you want), pinned colors (I often had a text file opened with hex color code to copy-paste them), margin management (I often had a transparent rectangle at the content size to use for placement), shape builder tool (so many steps to do this work using path difference and path union operations), lasso node selection (all this zoom in and zoom out to select dots one by one when a rectangle selection cannot do it), …
Between google fonts and squirrel fonts there are thousands of fonts and styles.
Nexusfont lets me build sub-collections and then i can install only the fonts i want from the dialogue to keep my system from having a bloated fonts folder.
The drawback is having to reload inkscape to see the new fonts. The benefit is that loadtime is much faster when only select fonts from a much larger collection have been installed into the system.
I tried the font browser dialogue in inkscape and it was not on par with what I'm already doing. I also tried FontBase but was just not thrilled with the some features being paywalled behind a FontBase Awesome Subscription model. While nexusfont has less polish, it also has less B.S..
As an Affinity Designer user, it's insane too see how close we went from only Illustrator having Shape Builder to both Designer and Inkscape releasing it so close together. It's super handy and happy to see it as an option everywhere now.
Honestly if they focused on cleaning up the UI I could see myself trying out Inkscape more seriously!
I bought Designer and Photo just a few months before 2.0 came out, and just before the window for free upgrade for existing customers begun.
I have to say it's more performant than Inkscape, clearly geared towards artists, but there are still stuff that are more easily done in Inkscape. These mostly relate to automation. To add insult to the injury there is NO plugin system for Designer. I think this is a huge oversight on Serif's part, people would be so happy to fill the gaps.
Indeed, another annoyance I have with Designer is how not purely vector it is.
I mean it's great and makes it a breeze to make documents but it really sucks for making web-targeted SVGs. Both Inkscape and Illustrator support using SVG as the project file and I never have to guess if the feature I'm using is going to actually export as vector or just rasterized and embedded as a base64 PNG (which is true for fancy gradients and some of the more advanced masking, not even just the raster persona stuff).
Honestly you better save your money if you can live without it. I've been using 1.x for years and they never asked for more money so I upgraded to show my support but I don't really think it's worth forking that much amount of money yet if you're happy with 1.x
For me Inkscape has been one of the stars of free software. I especially like how one can align all the things rather easily and exactly, without having to trust ones mouse pointer movement skills and helper lines. Of course SVG is also about exactness, so a tool working with SVGs should also allow you to do things exactly.
Looks like usability on mac improved massively between version 1 and this version. Version 1.0 was barely usable on a mac. I just tried version 1.3 out for a few minutes. The UI looks very slick and responsive compared to what I last saw. I'm not a designer but this looks like I could use it and would probably experience a bit of a learning curve. It's a bit intimidating with all the buttons on all sides of the window.
I love Inkscape but for as long as I can remember it's always been laggy on a
Mac. IIRC at one point there was a disclaimer on the website that the Mac version wasn't well maintained.
I'm running Inkscape 1.1 on an M1 Pro. I just measured time between clicking a plain rectangle and it being selected. It takes about 460 ms.
New 1.3 version takes 216 ms, about twice the speed. It looks a lot more usable!
Since Figma has gotten better and better, I have significantly reduced my usage of Inkscape, however, when dealing with SVGs I find that Inkscape is really good for solving bugs with the SVG exports from Figma.
This seems to be my only use-case currently. It also has several very useful features like crop-to-content for SVG.
There is a lot in this release that I'll readily use. Pinned colours and font collections in particular seem useful, but I'm looking forward to seeing how the improved node deletion logic works too. Deleting nodes used to have unintuitive effects on the path; not in terms of its shape, but in the distribution of the nodes on the section where you deleted one.
I vividly remember "designing" (with my light skills) a T-Shirt using Inkscape for a sports team back at university in ~2008. It was organized as a competition with the winner getting a free shirt.
IIRC it took me about 6h, the Inkscape UI was frustrating at first but eventually I got better at it and won the contest. Such a fun seeing other people running around the city of Karlsruhe (Germany) wearing my shirt.
Thank you Inkscape team! I'm seeing as much potential as with Blender in kicking some commercial vendor's butts!
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I use regularly Inkscape, and it has been a constant source of frustration. The UI is the exact opposite of how I expect things to work.
It's improving at breakneck speed though. 1.2 already solved some of my frustrations (the new interface for linecaps & line dots, amazing!)
Almost all the features in this release seem to solve a major frustration I had with Inkscape.
* The node deletion behavior, it was so annoying, how you delete a node on a straight line and suddenly you get some soup.
* The awful color palette. You had to manually edit text files to get your own palettes, couldn't edit them in Inkscape. I, in fact, never managed to create a custom palette. Pinned colors seem to solve this.
* Lasso selection. It was soo fiddly to select a group of nodes. One missclick and you had to start from scratch, clicking on the tinny controls.
* Multithreaded rendering. The single-threaded software renderer is a misery for complex projects, or just zooming in. Now Inkscape is going to be 12 times faster on my machine
* Font selection was utter garbage, the new UI seems promising
* Patterns was also a constant source of frustration, looks like this release improves it.
This is exciting. I'm looking forward to use this new release.
Now please give me a dialog for key rebinding, similar to Krita. And better key binding discoverability.
you can expect some performance gains but not really 12x it does not scale lineri .
you can edit SOME keyboard shortcuts in preference - Interface -keyboard .
Some (a lot) of actions are still not migrated to actions so you cannot change shortcuts easily. But this is ongoing process.
Krita is using the default KDE key binding dialog box. I don't know is there something similiar in GTK.
https://inkscape.org/doc/keys-1.3.x.html#idm734
It allows you to search for command by name and "tooltip description" and displays their assigned shortcuts. This is IMO the one of the few recent features that should be implemented in all applications. In Inkscape it is not as smooth as in IDEs, has somewhat slow first run, but I'm super glad it is even there.
In fact being free software means anyone can jump in and change the UI to work for you. Even for pay…
The new features are almost all things that I have wished Inkscape had dozens of times.
Font collections (the font menu is slow when you have to go through half of it to find the font you want), pinned colors (I often had a text file opened with hex color code to copy-paste them), margin management (I often had a transparent rectangle at the content size to use for placement), shape builder tool (so many steps to do this work using path difference and path union operations), lasso node selection (all this zoom in and zoom out to select dots one by one when a rectangle selection cannot do it), …
Congrats to the team!
Between google fonts and squirrel fonts there are thousands of fonts and styles.
Nexusfont lets me build sub-collections and then i can install only the fonts i want from the dialogue to keep my system from having a bloated fonts folder.
The drawback is having to reload inkscape to see the new fonts. The benefit is that loadtime is much faster when only select fonts from a much larger collection have been installed into the system.
I tried the font browser dialogue in inkscape and it was not on par with what I'm already doing. I also tried FontBase but was just not thrilled with the some features being paywalled behind a FontBase Awesome Subscription model. While nexusfont has less polish, it also has less B.S..
Honestly if they focused on cleaning up the UI I could see myself trying out Inkscape more seriously!
I have to say it's more performant than Inkscape, clearly geared towards artists, but there are still stuff that are more easily done in Inkscape. These mostly relate to automation. To add insult to the injury there is NO plugin system for Designer. I think this is a huge oversight on Serif's part, people would be so happy to fill the gaps.
Honestly you better save your money if you can live without it. I've been using 1.x for years and they never asked for more money so I upgraded to show my support but I don't really think it's worth forking that much amount of money yet if you're happy with 1.x
I'm running Inkscape 1.1 on an M1 Pro. I just measured time between clicking a plain rectangle and it being selected. It takes about 460 ms.
New 1.3 version takes 216 ms, about twice the speed. It looks a lot more usable!
This seems to be my only use-case currently. It also has several very useful features like crop-to-content for SVG.
IIRC it took me about 6h, the Inkscape UI was frustrating at first but eventually I got better at it and won the contest. Such a fun seeing other people running around the city of Karlsruhe (Germany) wearing my shirt.
Thank you Inkscape team! I'm seeing as much potential as with Blender in kicking some commercial vendor's butts!