[neonnoodle]

I prefer to do digital sketching/painting on an iPad these days, but on desktop I’m using increasingly more FOSS-based software. Adobe products are sometimes absolutely essential but between Krita, Inkscape and Blender I feel pretty confident for most digital image manipulation. It’s actually kind of a golden age of usable free software these days for artists!

[ShadowBanThis01]

I wish Inkscape were a little slicker, because vector-art software is basically moribund at this point.

Illustrator (aside from being part of Adobe's software-rental scam), has been abandoned for years. Affinity Designer is also basically static, as simple-but-important feature requests or bug reports go ignored year after year. I mean... there's no way to set a layer as non-printing, despite continual requests for it. If that's difficult to implement, then the software is hopeless anyway. You also can't enter exact sizes for multiple objects at once. Affinity seems to do the most obscure and dumb thing possible when you try to accomplish simple tasks that are well-understood in every other similar app.

Applications are simply not important to any for-profit company anymore, so we're stuck with the current state of the art, or worse, hideous regressions like those that plague Microsoft Office. Ugh, Word is a depressing shitshow now.

[HKH2]

Inkscape is a little buggy and unintuitive at times, but once you get used to its idiosyncrasies it's fine. For example, if you want to select a layer and move it with the keyboard, you can switch to another tool (like the node tool) and then back to the select tool and the arrow keys will work.

[ShadowBanThis01]

I just launched Inkscape (a recent version) for the first time in quite a while.

Not bad! And I enjoy that its default selection mode is the one I find most important in vector-art applications: select only things that are totally enclosed by the selection marquee.

Illustrator isn't even capable of selecting this way as an option, which makes it a monumentally tedious, deal-breaking PITA to use. And, of course, people have been complaining about this for decades now. Ignored by Adobe. So much for their "subscription model will allow us to do more timely bug fixes and enhancements" lie.

[HKH2]

If you're feeling a bit masochistic, I think you can get Inkscape to behave like that too.

[ShadowBanThis01]

I can self-punish adequately with various other applications, thanks!