One regular annoyance in Inkscape is that I can't find any clean way to control the keyboard focus. Here's a common example:
select several items; this may be quite tedious e.g. if the items are all in separate groups and/or there are a lot of them.
the selection has the keyboard focus.
perform an operation, like Align
the Align and Distribute panel now has the keyboard focus
At that point, I want to perform a keyboard operation on the selection, such as use a left-arrow key to shift it. Can't do that, of course, because the panel still has the keyboard focus, so arrow just changes the tool selection within that panel. Clicking anywhere on the drawing surface will put the keyboard focus back, but lose the current (tediously acquired) selection.
There are conventions in Windows for changing keyboard focus, but Inkscape doesn't seem to obey them. AFAICT, arrow, tab, and ctrl-tab typically do the same thing, which is just move the keyboard focus over one item. I see a comment on Alt-X, but that doesn't help the common task of trying to get the keyboard focus back to the drawing area.
Is there any easy way to move the keyboard focus back to the main drawing area without losing the current selection?
Beginners' Questions Controlling keyboard focus
Inkscape.org
One regular annoyance in Inkscape is that I can't find any clean way to control the keyboard focus. Here's a common example:
At that point, I want to perform a keyboard operation on the selection, such as use a left-arrow key to shift it. Can't do that, of course, because the panel still has the keyboard focus, so arrow just changes the tool selection within that panel. Clicking anywhere on the drawing surface will put the keyboard focus back, but lose the current (tediously acquired) selection.
There are conventions in Windows for changing keyboard focus, but Inkscape doesn't seem to obey them. AFAICT, arrow, tab, and ctrl-tab typically do the same thing, which is just move the keyboard focus over one item. I see a comment on Alt-X, but that doesn't help the common task of trying to get the keyboard focus back to the drawing area.
Is there any easy way to move the keyboard focus back to the main drawing area without losing the current selection?
The escape key works most often for me.
TD
Darned if you're not right! Can't believe I never noticed that. Thanks TD!