A list of 1.0 beta 1 feedback for Windows

I’m running Inkscape 1.0 beta 1 on Windows 10 on my Surface Book with its 2× display and Intel GPU. I think dropping all this feedback in one place is probably better for triage than me opening lots of individual bugs, and it’s easier for me as well, so I’m just dropping this all in here for now; do what you will with it. Except as noted, all items here are regressions from Inkscape 0.92.4.

This feedback is from less than half an hour of simple fiddling. I haven’t attempted to do any serious work with it. (I’m not using Inkscape in anger much at present.)

• When a window is drawn partially outside the screen, the area off-screen is not drawn; this is reasonable, but what’s not reasonable is that when you move that area back on-screen, it’s still not drawn.

• Should default to the win32 theme on Windows, because Adwaita is horrifically wasteful of space, e.g. Fill and Stroke panel has a minimum width about twice as wide, and buttons get preposterous amounts of padding, given how Inkscape uses them. And no, I am not exaggerating or being unreasonable with my superlatives here. The Adwaita theme is just that bad for use on a not-too-large display. It’s really, really bad. (OK, I’ll stop now!)

• Win32 theme: many interface elements are not scaled correctly, e.g. checkboxes and radio buttons in menus, and the scrollbars on the canvas and elsewhere are all twice as large as they should be on a 2× display.

• Win32 theme: when you get a scrollbar on the right hand sidebar, it’s done as an overlay scrollbar, despite the fact that Win32 never uses overlay scrollbars (that’s UWP, and a different style of scrollbar), and that there are now-inaccessible controls underneath (particularly on high-DPI displays, where the scrollbar is twice as wide as it should be, per the last item). Most critically, you can’t close a panel any more!

• Win32 theme: spinboxes are pretty bad, with the down and up arrows in completely the wrong places, and one missing in height-constrained places like the toolbar. The Fill and Stroke panel’s Blur and Opacity pickers are particularly good places to see this problem.

• Win32 theme: spinboxes and text areas, when disabled, take on a blue background instead of either grey like buttons and dropdowns, or just white with grey text.

• Win32 theme: on menu items with submenus, the › that should be present to indicate the presence of the submenu is missing.

• Win32 theme: dividers in menus do not draw a visible line (they just take a couple of pixels of space).

• Win32 theme: dropdowns behave in the GTK way, where the options are aligned so that the currently-selected item is in the right place, rather than the Windows way, where the dropdown is rendered entirely below the dropdown, with the selected item possessing initial focus.

• Top-level menu access keys are not indicated at times when they should be. (It’s acceptable to hide them so long as they’re shown as soon as you interact with it keyboardily, but it only shows them while you hold Alt, not after that—although it does handle the access key underlines for items inside the menus.)

• Menu/submenu event handling doesn’t behave natively: Alt should enter menu selection mode (e.g. Alt then F to open the File menu, just like Alt+F); Escape should only close one level of menu; clicking on an open menu/submenu should not close it. (Not a regression.)

• Keyboard shortcut order shown in menus is non-native, e.g. Shift+Ctrl+Alt+S should be Ctrl+Alt+Shift+S. (I think Shift should be last on GNOME/*nix in general too? But definitely on Windows.) (Not a regression.)

• Panning is much slower and more jittery. (0.92.4 would do what looked like tiled updating, but 1.0 looks to be trying to do it all at once, and the result is much worse for responsiveness.)

• Zooming is slower. Not enormously, but measurably, in a way that feels more like constant overhead than related to the complexity of the document. But I haven’t tried it on any particularly complex documents yet.