I'm really struggling with the multiple comments saying that inkscape has buggy UI or bad UX.
I used inkscape extensively about 5-6 years ago and had a really good experience. A couple of months ago I used the up to date version for some ad hoc work (designing a logo) to the same effect.
I think this is a great milestone for a great app. Thumbs up to the people making this possible!
Despite being amazing applications, Gimp and Inkscape receive these complaints a lot - and so did Blender until recently.
I think one category of complaints leveled against the UI/UX is these projects is that they are "fine". They are good enough to get real work done. And if you're fine with fine, then the objections seem needlessly nit-picky... and they are!
But these apps are for creative projects - you open them up to do creative work. It's certainly possible to do creative work in a "fine" environment, but it's a lot more enjoyable in an environment that sparks joy (tm).
The Blender transformation has been incredible: it went from "fine" to "sparks joy" despite the fact it's a massively complex behemoth. Sometimes I open Blender just because it makes me happy to see the UI. Open it up, extrude and scale a cube a bit, and close it. Ahh.
For me Aesprite (pixel editor), Ableton Live (music workstation), and Pico-8 (game maker) have the same feeling. It's just fun to work with the tool for anything... and double-y fun when you're working on something fun: it compounds the enjoyment.
When I first used Sketch when I was on Mac I had that feeling too. Going back to Inkscape after that was "fine". I really like Inkscape. It's my go-to vector editor, does everything I need, and I'm very grateful it exists. But I'd never open it up just to feel happy. I'd love to see it magically do a Blender.
>The Blender transformation has been incredible: it went from "fine" to "sparks joy" despite the fact it's a massively complex behemoth. Sometimes I open Blender just because it makes me happy to see the UI! Open it up, extrude and scale a cube a bit and close it. Ahh.
I usually reference Blender circa early 2000s as one of the worst UIs not intentionally designed to be bad I've encountered. I'd say it had steps more like "gah", "bleh", "usable", "ok", "fine." I haven't used it in awhile but I imagine its light-years ahead of what I recall.
GIMP as long as I can remember has been "ok." It lacked streamlined features available in Photoshop and most complaints for the UI were basically centered around "why isn't this Photoshop."
Unless there are significant workload improvements, no one likes to learn a new UI when ultimately they just want to get their current work done. Software is a tool for most people and UI designers should always keep that in mind before making drastic changes/"improvements."
The first shot compares it to 2.79, which is descended from the 2.50 redesign in 2009.
I just fired it up for the first time in a while (got a 3D printer!) and have had to relearn a bit, but I'm a fan overall.
Not shown in those screenshots, it now defaults to left-click selection! Significant muscle memory to retrain for that, but it's nice to have it match every other piece of software I've ever used.
Blenders ui is amazing. It lays out complex UIs and controls beautifully. I'd say I loved blenders interface even more polished than that of photoshop.
There's lots of interest in community asking if the in-house UI system they've created can be separated from the blender codebase so it could be its own GUI framework but IIRC it is not possible.
I'm on the opposite of the spectrum with Ableton -- I rather hate the UI and wish they would not reinvent the UI wheel so much. But then again I come from an FLStudio background and that programs has many of the same complaints leveled against it.
I'm shocked at how much negativity there is here for Inkscape - it's long been a go-to example for how great open source software can be, in my mind.
These days, I often use the (non-free, $26) Vexlio [1] software since it works better for my use-case (diagrams for use in Latex documents). But Inkscape is clearly the more fully-featured product for most users.
I think it's a love it or hate it thing. People seem to either point at it as an example of how good open source software can be, or how bad open source software can be. Unfortunately I'm in the latter camp. A huge amount of this could be the difference between using it on mac and using it on linux though
The history of FreeHand is actually quite interesting [1]. Adobe acquired it in 1994 when they bought Aldus. The FTC then ordered the product to be returned to Altsys which was subsequently acquired by Macromedia in 1995. Macromedia developed it for a number of years before being acquired by Adobe in 2005. Finally, Adobe had successfully gained control of FreeHand whereby they immediately killed it.
One wonders why the FTC did not block Adobe’s acquisition of Macromedia or at least require FreeHand to be spun off into a separate company. The market has really suffered since Adobe became dominant.
omg I'm still missing freehand.. :/
Anyway inkscape it's a nice tool. (I had used freehand, illustrator, flash.. ) and inkscape it's fine (When I need to do some vector work I know it's there) but I mostly work on Ubuntu.
I love Inkscape, but I hate the UI. What I wouldn't give to have blender-esque ui in Inkscape. That would give illustrator and Corel draw a serious run for their money.
I love Inkscape, but it definitely has some problems. I hope the developers see this and understand how grateful I am that they created a tool that I use everyday and that despite the bugs I recommend Inkscape to everyone. Awesome work by the Inkscape team!
The bugs I encounter most frequently are:
1. When I create an inkscape svgs on windows and then open it on linux the distance two between lines of text changes and I have to reformat all the text. If I go in the reverse direction I have to add additional space because lines of text overlap. It is not a font issue.
2. With large SVG files containing many elements, copy pasting a single simple element can take between 30 seconds to 2 minutes. The app just freezes. Restarting the program does not fix this. My best guess is that it is using an inefficent data structure and adding a new element to this data structure scales with the size of the number of existing elements. A similar thing happens when rescaling the width of a line.
3. Sometimes parts of an element will disappear. This happens when undoing and redoing a change or zooming in or out many times quickly. If I zoom out, wait and zoom back in the element will reappear.
4. When creating a line which ends in an arrow, the arrow symbol I used will be duplicated in the arrow selector. Some drawings I make have a few hundred arrows, meaning that if I want to change the type of arrow I'm using I need to scroll through a few hundred clones of the same arrow type.
5. Occasionally when saving it will just crash and corrupt my svg. For this reason I change the filename every few saves since this bug cost me two days of work once. The last time I encountered a corrupted was years agos, but once bitten twice shy.
6. When copy pasting an element that is a member of a group the new element will, at a point in the future, decide it is a member of the group it was a copy of. Ungrouping fixes this.
I use inkscape on Linux (Ubuntu), Windows (7/10) and OSX. It is the most stable on Linux and I rarely see issues on Linux. Despite all these problems is it my favorite drawing tool and I use it in nearly every project I have.
The conventional way to save files is to write a new file and only as the last step do a rename. This solves the crash corruption problem. Does Inkscape not do this?
No idea. One theory is that it could be the case that at some point memory corruption occurred inside the Inkscape. The save succeeded but the data that written was corrupt. Once the file was saved, the write buffer was cleared and this caused the crash.
>The conventional way to save files is to write a new file and only as the last step do a rename. This solves the crash corruption problem. Does Inkscape not do this?
I did a quick read through the Inkscape source code and it looks like Inkscape writes straight to the file but I could be wrong.
My experience with Illustrator was that it made no sense, so I went and read the first 50 pages of the (excellent) manual, and then I understood everything. It taught basic principles of the application philosophy which explained everything I'd been missing so far, and which would lead me to understand everything else I'd do in the future. I never had to touch the manual again.
My experience with Inkscape is that it made no sense (either on its own, or compared to Illustrator), and the manual wasn't very good, so I googled until I found an answer. Then something else didn't make sense, so I googled until I found an answer. There was never any point at which it got simpler. Learning one thing didn't help me learn anything else. There just wasn't enough coherence of design.
For example, I drew a round-rectangle, and then I needed to resize it. (Unlike Illustrator, there doesn't seem to be any way to set the size beforehand.) Inkscape resizes the corner radius, too, which is something I've never once wanted, so that's a strange default. In Illustrator, this is controlled by a checkbox labeled "Scale Corners". In Inkscape, it's a cryptic icon on a tiny button (manual: "a group of four toggle buttons, the second from the left"). Then, regardless of the setting of this toggle, as you resize the object, it still scales the corners during the drag -- that is, the live-resize shows what you're not going to get! The first 5 times I tried it, I immediately hit Undo because I was sure it was broken, or I missed something. I've never seen any other application do this. You have to trust that you got the settings right, and imagine what it's going to look like when you release the mouse button.
Inkscape is full of little frustrations like this. I love the concept of a free vector graphics editor, but I'll always use anything other than Inkscape, given the choice.
I'm certainly surprised to hear that. I only do occasional vector graphics work, but for me Inkscape is in the too-rare category of "open-source apps with solid UIs". Admittedly, the domain is tricky, but as somebody who used Illustrator, I got that part out of the way long ago. Gimp, on the other hand, has always felt clunky to me, despite a similar amount of experience.
I thought the UI isn't that bad until I tried Gravit Designer. I don't know if it's comparable to Inkscape in terms of features, but to me as a more occasional user it's a vast difference in usability(even considering the compulsory online account with Gravit). Maybe more proficient users would feel different but in Inkscape there are so many buttons and switches visible at all times that I constantly have to look for the right one.
But again, that's just me as someone using it every couple of months; in general I always manage to get the stuff done in Inkscape and it seems pretty solid behind the UI.
I've used Adobe Illustrator intensively for a number of years, and have attempted to use Inkscape for some similar projects, and have found it quite robust!
The biggest problem is that it is almost universal in Abode apps is space to pan and drag the canvas. Inkscape had this at one time, but then removed it. Hopefully it has come back otherwise this app will never reach the power and speed of Adobe products.
For advanced users, it's all about the keyboard shortcuts!
I took a very short look at the Mac version. They made great progress, yes, but they aren’t there yet.
The menu bar seems native now, but save dialogs aren’t, and look out of place (and, IMO, ugly).
Also, clipboard support is limited. You can’t paste copied images into TextEdit, for example (the standard image format on Mac OS is PDF, so it should put a PDF representation of the copied data on the clipboard)
Does that make it unworkable? No, but there’s room for improvement.
On a stock Fedora install of Inkscape, I can think of half a dozen particular UI actions which either lead to compounding bugs or crash the program.
I'm scared to even enter custom size attributes for objects using the X/Y text fields on the top bar because it consistently blows up the value and then brings down Inkscape.
This behavior is observed across several concurrent virtual machines with different environments.
I think the learning curve is kinda steep in the beginning. It took me years of opening Inkscape, trying to build something and closing it in frustration before I finally took the time to learn the basics properly.
I love what you can do with it, but the UX is not intuitive. After you get used to the keystrokes, everything makes sense, so it is mostly a problem for new users.
I used inkscape extensively about 5-6 years ago and had a really good experience. A couple of months ago I used the up to date version for some ad hoc work (designing a logo) to the same effect.
I think this is a great milestone for a great app. Thumbs up to the people making this possible!