Soft Select

Migrated from https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/1746135
From 2018-01-30

Summary (edit):

Inkscape lacks a soft selection tool, a tool where you can select one area or vertex, but the amount of transformation is applied at a different radius with different percent.

See here - https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/maya/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2016/ENU/Maya/files/GUID-9D29FDE2-7715-4FD6-9F45-5D233A9C73CF-htm.html

Example: let's say you have a curve of a car in Inkscape. Ok, you want to change an area. If you have soft select, you can change an area more rapidly than having to select and move vertexs one-by-one.

Additional Information/Comments:

Blender's Proportional Editing with various falloff settings
As suggested in the original thread, Inkscape does have Node Sculpting

To upload designs, you'll need to enable LFS and have an admin enable hashed storage. More information