This is what stops me of using it as a professional user: you can get things done, but the processes are more convoluted and less intuitive.

The way Blender does it is near optimum in my eyes: not shying away from a major overhaul once in 5 years and aleays making sure it is really making things better.

I would think Blender does a good job too, but inkscape has no paid contributors. If it had people employed to work on it, I think you would see more attention being paid to UI.

Blender is one of the most successful projects out there, and assuming other projects could just 'do what Blender does' is ignoring some of the fundamental differences between Blender and smaller projects.

It isn't so much the paid contributors (though they help) as it is that Blender Foundation was making commercial quality projects for years using Blender with artists and programmers at the same place so they were able to provide immediate feedback to each other.

The closest other projects have to this are vague forum/bugtracker posts that more often than not give little (or misleading) idea to the programmers what is needed.

Having an artist sit next to you and giving them the mouse and keyboard to show you directly in the software what they are doing, how they are doing it and what they want to do is much faster and gives you way more information and you can bounce forth and back alternative ideas, perhaps make minor quick modifications on the spot as a prototype or lead to an idea, etc.

(the next best thing is you being both the artist and the programmer - which is how many of FLOSS art oriented programs are made really - but there is a great danger of you getting used to your software's drawbacks and being unwilling to address them)

Much more importantly, Blender doesn't shy away from getting inspired by their proprietary counterparts. AFAIK they're even working on a 'industry keybinds' setting which makes changing over from Maya a breeze.

Programs like GIMP (or even entire OS UIs like Gnome and KDE) often shy away from 'aping' respectively Photoshop or Apple. But those proprietary vendors have spent millions of dollars on focus groups and man hours to optimize their UI and UX. Benefiting from that seems like a no-brainer, but alas.. NIH and proprietary hate reigns supreme.

Eh, Photoshop hasn't really optimized their UI/UX, their UI goes back to the original MacPaint by Bill Atkinson (Photoshop started as a more powerful MacPaint) and has evolved over the years starting from that. It is just that it became a very common UI for similar applications and the reason to make something similar isn't because Adobe has spent millions optimizing it, but because a lot of people are already familiar with it. However the same can be said for GIMP's UI nowadays.

And really personally i find Photoshop UI atrocious and if i had to chose between that and GIMP's i'd pick GIMP any time (though overall i actually prefer PSP7's UI which IMO is the best of any of those).

I agree with the spirit of jorvi's comment but your specific point points are notable.

Last time I checked ps still defaulted to require control-shift-something-non-standard for redo, unless you customize the key mappings. there are much more standard bindings and they even admit the only reason for this default is legacy users .

If you refer to Ctrl+Shift+Z, it is very common for redo and also very convenient since you switch between undo/redo by pressing Shift (which is also consistent with many other shortcuts that use Shift as a way to reverse their effect - see Tab/Shift+Tab, Alt+Tab/Shift+Alt+Tab, etc). Many programs provide both shortcuts for redo (including by OS vendors, e.g. Microsoft) though they're not always shown in the Edit menu (f.e. Notepad++ shows both whereas Visual Studio only shows Ctrl+Y but also supports Ctrl+Shift+Z)

Having said that i think Photoshop's non-standard Undo/Redo use is that it uses Ctrl+Z as a "last step undo" in that Ctrl+Z flips between undo/redo so that if you do some operation, press Ctrl+Z, it undoes that operation and if you press Ctrl+Z again it redoes it (and Ctrl+Z again undoes it, etc). This is because Photoshop at the past, like many other programs, had only a single step undo where Ctrl+Z would undo the last operation - including undo itself (so if you painted, undo would undo the paint and the next undo would undo the undo itself thus restoring the paint). Many artists used to this as a way to quickly compare the result of operations like crops, filters, etc so it became part of their workflow and was mentioned in articles, books, etc so Adobe most likely decided to use a different key when they introduced an undo stack. That was at a time that many other programs still had a single undo step so using a different key wouldn't really be non-standard. But again that became part of workflow, documented, etc so both remained as they were to avoid alienating users.

Though TBH that is based on my very brief use of Photoshop many many years ago, things may have changed since then.

Note that some simple programs still work like that, e.g. Notepad only has a single level of undo and pressing undo again undoes the undo itself.

I think we're agreeing after the fog clears of remembering the details.

To be more precise, after looking again the issue was, there was no way to use control-z for multiple undo without remapping the keyboard. Looks like they finally fixed it:

In older versions of Photoshop, you could only press Ctrl + Z once to undo your most recent change. If you wanted to undo more changes, you had to change the shortcut keys to Ctrl + Alt + Z.

from version 20.0.0 (CC 2019) onwards, we can just press Ctrl + Z which makes things a little easier

There was a blog post by a product engineering at adobe that lamented they had to stick with it for so long for legacy reasons. This supports your point that many parts of the UX would likely be much different given a modern clean sheet design.

Gimp is garbage bro. A window for each tool? That your WM manages? Okay where is that tools window or layers window or what if I’m editing 20 icons and one of my icons was covered by a browser window. At least old photoshop would remember z order and bring them to the surface and keep tools on top. Gimp May have fixed this one issue but it’s an example of why paid UX design wins 99 times out of 10

Gimp has had a single-window layout for a long time now.

Inkscape vector tools are way more sophisticated than Sketch’s. For simple vector editing tasks Sketch might be ok, and for creating whole responsive screen designs Sketch is awesome. But vector editing is really one of Sketch’s weakest points (eg. creation of combined paths). The look of the UI is of course not comparable, but i’d prefer functionality over looks.

It doesn’t need to be any better to satisfy this user. I also pull it out 2-4 times a year and am happy that everything has more or less stayed the same for 8+ years.

This is the message I hear very consistently about Inkscape. The people who love it most are the occasional users. It's good enough for small, infrequent work.

They seem to keep pushing it as a professional alternative to Adobe Illustrator, but no matter how many individual features they add, it just doesn't seem designed for that kind of user.

That was my point. Sure it could be better, but at a cost (design+dev'p, and alienation of users). It seems big/commercial softwares love to take that cost.

Because they have paying and active customers who want improvements even if it means that one has to relearn some things here and there.

Not enhancing UX because some users might have already gotten used to the current setup is rather shortsighted (relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1172/ ). What about all the people you don't get on board because the UX is terrible compared to all the other tools?

> they have paying and active customers who want improvements

My experience is that when software reaches a certain level of maturity, major 'improvements' to the UI are driven very much not by the users.

> Not enhancing UX because some users might have already gotten used to the current setup is rather shortsighted

Perhaps. It depends proportion of 'some'. 1%..99%, it depends doesn't it. You're pushing for change with no quantification of the value of it. If it ain't broke, don't fix it, so first find out if it's broke.

I do agree with you. There's an advantage to having an interface remain predictable. At the same time I wish you had the ability to dynamically re-arrange the UI with plugins. It'd be very cool to have a Sketch-emulating layout for Inkscape, as a plugin.