8 ms·

I used to use Inkscape constantly on Windows & Linux, and really like it. I found the UI intuitive and it did absolutely everything I asked of it. Which is why

I used to use Inkscape constantly on Windows & Linux, and really like it. I found the UI intuitive and it did absolutely everything I asked of it. Which is why the XQuartz/&c. user experience on macOS really really surprised me. It's absolutely unusable. Inkscape for macOS basically may was well not exist as far as my experience with it goes. Are there other comparable GTK+ apps that work well under macOS or is this a common story?

m_mueller 9y ago
It works okay-ish for me, although I pretty much never use copy&paste in XQuartz on mac. But I still can't name a better free vector graphics program on mac.
- contingencies 9y ago
  Me too. Not a great issue, though the XQuartz background thing kinda screws up Command+tab, it's still perfectly usable, if a little rough around the edges.
clumsysmurf 9y ago
I wonder ... if they should do what Wireshark did, and abandon GTK for Qt.
- scrollaway 9y ago
  Probably, and I've heard from some Inkscape devs that they'd like to. But it's a pretty massive project, which would directly result in the current developers being less proficient at the UI toolkit they use. Qt is an easy sell on fresh projects, but switching a large existing codebase is huge.
  - kraig911 9y ago
    At this point moving to Qt for something as large as Inkscape would be too massive I imagine. Just +1'ing your point. Inkscape's UI uses so much common elements out of GTK too that it would really hose some of the developed creature comforts the community has got used to. It'd be a huge project with not a lot of ROI to go and redo all the chrome.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago
      Sure, but how does it compare with gtk 2 vs 3? We're already talking about replacing a working toolkit with a significantly different one.
  - MichaelGG 9y ago
    If Wireshark is any example, definitely not. I've not met anyone that likes the Qt version (in VoIP, it's an indispensable tool used all the time) - it seems like it lost a ton of polish.
    - Etzos 9y ago
      This is somewhat off-topic, but I'm curious since every person who has had this sentiment that I've known was unable to provide specific parts which were lacking. Do you perhaps have a short list of top things which are missing their polish with the Qt version of Wireshark? I'm just a light user of the tool and am genuinely curious about what things it may have lost in the transition.
    - pilif 9y ago
      I’m I using it for debugging barcode scanners talking to a web service. I much prefer the qt based UI. It’s much faster and obviously feels much more native to the platform
      - yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago
        > more native to the platform For a specific platform, or multiple?
        Kwpolska 9y ago
        Qt works much better than GTK+ on both Windows and macOS. Unlike GTK+, it’s much harder to distinguish a Qt app and a native app for those platforms.
        inferiorhuman 9y ago
        The Qt version is miles ahead on OSX since it's no longer a clunky X11 app.
  - dom0 9y ago
    > Qt is an easy sell on fresh projects, but switching a large existing codebase is huge. There have been a lot of major projects ported to Qt over the years, both commercial and open source (e.g. Wireshark, Subsurface).
    - scrollaway 9y ago
      I'm well aware. We've also sent spacecraft to Mars. Porting a large codebase from one UI toolkit to another, all the while giving up hard-earned knowledge in a volunteer-driven project is still a super daunting task.
      - dom0 9y ago
        I'd argue that this depends a lot how the code is structured. Back in the day of Win32 and MFC it was not unusual at all to very tightly integrate logic and the UI, often even outsourcing parts of state machines to GUI controls etc.; such a code base is difficult to port to anything. If, on the other hand, the application is written in a more layered approach, then porting from one toolkit to another may mean to just re-engineer the UI and only the UI. Complex custom controls mentioned by Raphael below are another factor.
        Thimothy 9y ago
        It's a graphic design program. If there is a project where tight integration between the graphic library and the rest of the codebase is expected (for performance reasons) and hard to avoid is here. In wireshark, for example, its meat is in the networking code, and the important skills of the developers are there, on inkscape, on the other side, the non-trivial contributions probably happen very near to the graphic frontend. If GTK goes to the gutter, retraining the developers to get to the same level in Qt will set Inkscape back years.
    - raphman 9y ago
      I'd argue that both WireShark and Subsurface have much simpler UI (and use mostly standard widgets) than Inkscape.
- lucaspiller 9y ago
  Cue the downvotes, but at least if you use Electron and build a custom UI you don't need to worry about it being unsupported or poorly supported in the future on certain platforms. It's just HTML + CSS which is going to be around a lot longer than the current iteration of UI frameworks. (Ok yes, you could still face issues with the underlying runtime being unsupported, but I have a feeling that and JavaScript are going to stick around for a while)
  - coldtea 9y ago
    >Cue the downvotes, but at least if you use Electron and build a custom UI you don't need to worry about it being unsupported or poorly supported in the future on certain platforms. Yes, you'll don't have to worry: you'll be certain that it is poorly supported today and in the future on all platforms as far as the topics we discuss are concerned (native UI likeness).
    - stupidcar 9y ago
      I'll take a non-native looking app that works (every Electron app I've tried on macOS) over XQuartz-based garbage that hangs forever at startup, as the current "stable" Inkscape release does for me.
      - coldtea 9y ago
        Maybe, but not for a graphics editor. Slack hogs RAM and burns battery like crazy, and it's a bloody chat app -- as simple as it gets. Now imagine an Electron version of Inscape with complex vector editing, gradients and co on screen...
        TeMPOraL 9y ago
        It's not even very hard to imagine. Just go to any web-based diagram drawing service (there's plenty of that), and look how sluggish and crappy it feels even when performing simplest and most basic tasks. Now multiply that crappiness 10x for the complexity of vector drawings (100x if you're doing vector art), and additional 10x for the complexity of the effects vector formats can handle - and you'll get a ballpark of how Inkscape would feel if it was an Electron app.
mikenew 9y ago
There's a branch/package by one of the devs that uses the native menu bar, native copy paste, drag and drop, and a few other things that make it feel like an actual Mac application. No clue why it isn't the official distribution, but it's been that way for years. https://inkscape.org/cs/~su_v/galleries/ https://inkscape.org/cs/~su_v/galleries/
- pix64 9y ago
  This hasn't been updated in 2 years.
- justinclift 9y ago
  I used to use that, and for my needs (pretty lightweight) it was fine. Apparently the Inkspace developers were looking for this OSX-native-like version to be further developed before they'd promote it. Which is a shame, as release-early-release-often seems like it would have been a better idea. Oh well. :/
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
jvm 9y ago
I ran into this issue and ended up using Affinity Designer. I was pleasantly surprised, it's actually quite comparable to Adobe Illustrator. It's not open source but at $50 much more reasonable than Adobe.
- rootlocus 9y ago
  I second this. I've been using Affinity Designer for posters, UI mock-ups, icons, etc. Honestly, I can't use Inkscape at all. I find the interface highly bloated and the whole application generally slow.
  - melling 9y ago
    How does Designer compare to Illustrator feature wise, and as far a usability? We already have Illustrator. Is it worth adding Designer?
    - mr_than 9y ago
      I use the two side by side. At times I've found Designer's SVG support actually worked better than Illustrator. Illustrator is definitely faster but there are quite a number of useful pixel/recolouring features in Designer. Generally though the maturity and advanced features (mesh, isolate edit, Pathfinder!) eclipse what Designer brings to the table. I was a long time Fireworks holdout, and Designer is maybe the closest in feel compared to Sketch or Illustrator (and they're copying each other better now). All said, the bang for buck is great though, and UI is way easier than Inkscape I gotta say ;)
      - musha68k 9y ago
        Just another data point: to me Affinity Designer actually seems to render much faster than Adobe Illustrator (on a 2015 Macbook Pro with Intel integrated graphics chipset).
- sewer_bird 9y ago
  Thanks for this: I didn't know about Designer, and was similarly let down by how less pleasant Inkscape was on Mac, coming from a lovely experience of it on Windows.
audidude 9y ago
One problem is that they are still on Gtk 2.x. There is so much work that was done in 3.x over the last 7 years that improves things. Visual Studio for Mac is also Gtk 2.x, but they (Xamarin at the time) invested heavily in a custom Gtk fork as much of the hacks were not suitable upstream.
- samtoday 9y ago
  I just launched Inkscape, and noticed the port seems to be done! In Fedora 26, they ship Inkscape 0.92 which uses Gtk+ 3.
  - mc- 9y ago
    0.92.x does not use gtk3 (there is an experimental compile flag to use it, but it's still experimental)
    - audidude 9y ago
      You're both right. Fedora enables this option on F26. rpm -qa | grep inkscape inkscape-0.92.1-4.20170510bzr15686.fc26.x86_64 ldd /usr/bin/inkscape | grep gtk libgtkmm-3.0.so.1 => /lib64/libgtkmm-3.0.so.1 (0x00007f12a6a2f000) libgtk-3.so.0 => /lib64/libgtk-3.so.0 (0x00007f12a4dbb000)
Animats 9y ago
I've been very pleased with Inkscape for general draw program use. I use it to create Wikipedia illustrations, since Wikipedia prefers SVG.
- test9753 9y ago
  For simple vector diagrams, I've found https://www.draw.io https://www.draw.io (similar to MS Visio) to be very convenient. The code is also open source (Apache-2.0): https://github.com/jgraph/draw.io https://github.com/jgraph/draw.io
  - hatmatrix 9y ago
    I didn't know about draw.io's license - that is great. I have been enjoying yEd but also looking for other diagramming software since rotating text is difficult in yEd, and it's not free software [2]. [1] https://www.yworks.com/products/yed https://www.yworks.com/products/yed [2] http://yed.yworks.com/support/qa/515/why-not-an-open-source-license http://yed.yworks.com/support/qa/515/why-not-an-open-source-...
jpswade 9y ago
I found the same issue, so promptly moved to use BoxySVG, which I must say is pretty amazingly simple and modern. Sure, it's not open source, but it is free.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
btschaegg 9y ago
I agree that Inkscape is awesome, but the UI still could use some love in some places. What I am regularly missing, for example, is a widget that displays nested groups as intuitively as Adobe Illustrator does. Inkscape gives you a possibility to search for elements with its XML-widget, but that one is really fiddly and doesn't support many really useful usecases (quickly toggling visibility, selecting multiple elements, regrouping by dragging elements out of a group...).
- mc- 9y ago
  Like the objects dialog in 0.92 ?
  - btschaegg 9y ago
    Oh, did I miss out on something? ...I'll have a look at that then, thanks for the hint! :-)
etatoby 9y ago
When I was using OS X, I used to compile my own version using Brew that behaved like a native application. There are flags to do just that, but it's a very lengthy process, because you have to compile GTK and other libraries first. It works well, although there are occasional bugs, such as the shortcut keys using Ctrl instead of Cmd, if I recall correctly.
- oddevan 9y ago
  You know, I'd be willing to do that. Do you know of a good tutorial on this?
  - fkistner 9y ago
    No need to compile GTK, etc. yourself. Homebrew has you covered. brew tap caskformula/caskformula brew install caskformula/caskformula/inkscape Mentioned at the bottom of the page [1]. [1]: https://inkscape.org/en/download/mac-os/ https://inkscape.org/en/download/mac-os/
skykooler 9y ago
GIMP works decently well under OSX. It didn't until recently, though; it used to be the same XQuartz story until they finished the native GTK+ build.
musha68k 9y ago
Save yourself the hassle and buy Affinity Designer – it does a better job of most of what I did before with Adobe Photoshop & Illustrator (or Sketch for that matter). I'm very grateful to my designer friend who recommended it to me. It's 50 Euros... just buy it and get happy :)
tomxor 9y ago
You've just explained why you find it intuitive / better... (familiarity). Inkscape/Illustrator/whatever doesn't really have a layout, it's just: shit all over the place, some in tool palette thingimombobs, some hidden under contextual menus and file menus. Sometimes there is some effort to make mode based or hierarchy give some kind of sense of order but it's always artificial, there are too many tools and there don't need to be. I know you have to learn to love these things when you use them daily, and you can isolate yourself from the most offensive bits through gradual configuration... but when you step back and be objective, cmon, it's a steaming pile o' crap. Oh yeah, and moving to gitlab isn't going to help that.

m_mueller 9y ago

It works okay-ish for me, although I pretty much never use copy&paste in XQuartz on mac. But I still can't name a better free vector graphics program on mac.

contingencies 9y ago
Me too. Not a great issue, though the XQuartz background thing kinda screws up Command+tab, it's still perfectly usable, if a little rough around the edges.

clumsysmurf 9y ago

I wonder ... if they should do what Wireshark did, and abandon GTK for Qt.

scrollaway 9y ago
Probably, and I've heard from some Inkscape devs that they'd like to. But it's a pretty massive project, which would directly result in the current developers being less proficient at the UI toolkit they use. Qt is an easy sell on fresh projects, but switching a large existing codebase is huge.
- kraig911 9y ago
  At this point moving to Qt for something as large as Inkscape would be too massive I imagine. Just +1'ing your point. Inkscape's UI uses so much common elements out of GTK too that it would really hose some of the developed creature comforts the community has got used to. It'd be a huge project with not a lot of ROI to go and redo all the chrome.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago
    Sure, but how does it compare with gtk 2 vs 3? We're already talking about replacing a working toolkit with a significantly different one.
- MichaelGG 9y ago
  If Wireshark is any example, definitely not. I've not met anyone that likes the Qt version (in VoIP, it's an indispensable tool used all the time) - it seems like it lost a ton of polish.
  - Etzos 9y ago
    This is somewhat off-topic, but I'm curious since every person who has had this sentiment that I've known was unable to provide specific parts which were lacking. Do you perhaps have a short list of top things which are missing their polish with the Qt version of Wireshark? I'm just a light user of the tool and am genuinely curious about what things it may have lost in the transition.
  - pilif 9y ago
    I’m I using it for debugging barcode scanners talking to a web service. I much prefer the qt based UI. It’s much faster and obviously feels much more native to the platform
    - yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago
      > more native to the platform For a specific platform, or multiple?
      - Kwpolska 9y ago
        Qt works much better than GTK+ on both Windows and macOS. Unlike GTK+, it’s much harder to distinguish a Qt app and a native app for those platforms.
      - inferiorhuman 9y ago
        The Qt version is miles ahead on OSX since it's no longer a clunky X11 app.
- dom0 9y ago
  > Qt is an easy sell on fresh projects, but switching a large existing codebase is huge. There have been a lot of major projects ported to Qt over the years, both commercial and open source (e.g. Wireshark, Subsurface).
  - scrollaway 9y ago
    I'm well aware. We've also sent spacecraft to Mars. Porting a large codebase from one UI toolkit to another, all the while giving up hard-earned knowledge in a volunteer-driven project is still a super daunting task.
    - dom0 9y ago
      I'd argue that this depends a lot how the code is structured. Back in the day of Win32 and MFC it was not unusual at all to very tightly integrate logic and the UI, often even outsourcing parts of state machines to GUI controls etc.; such a code base is difficult to port to anything. If, on the other hand, the application is written in a more layered approach, then porting from one toolkit to another may mean to just re-engineer the UI and only the UI. Complex custom controls mentioned by Raphael below are another factor.
      - Thimothy 9y ago
        It's a graphic design program. If there is a project where tight integration between the graphic library and the rest of the codebase is expected (for performance reasons) and hard to avoid is here. In wireshark, for example, its meat is in the networking code, and the important skills of the developers are there, on inkscape, on the other side, the non-trivial contributions probably happen very near to the graphic frontend. If GTK goes to the gutter, retraining the developers to get to the same level in Qt will set Inkscape back years.
  - raphman 9y ago
    I'd argue that both WireShark and Subsurface have much simpler UI (and use mostly standard widgets) than Inkscape.
lucaspiller 9y ago
Cue the downvotes, but at least if you use Electron and build a custom UI you don't need to worry about it being unsupported or poorly supported in the future on certain platforms. It's just HTML + CSS which is going to be around a lot longer than the current iteration of UI frameworks. (Ok yes, you could still face issues with the underlying runtime being unsupported, but I have a feeling that and JavaScript are going to stick around for a while)
- coldtea 9y ago
  >Cue the downvotes, but at least if you use Electron and build a custom UI you don't need to worry about it being unsupported or poorly supported in the future on certain platforms. Yes, you'll don't have to worry: you'll be certain that it is poorly supported today and in the future on all platforms as far as the topics we discuss are concerned (native UI likeness).
  - stupidcar 9y ago
    I'll take a non-native looking app that works (every Electron app I've tried on macOS) over XQuartz-based garbage that hangs forever at startup, as the current "stable" Inkscape release does for me.
    - coldtea 9y ago
      Maybe, but not for a graphics editor. Slack hogs RAM and burns battery like crazy, and it's a bloody chat app -- as simple as it gets. Now imagine an Electron version of Inscape with complex vector editing, gradients and co on screen...
      - TeMPOraL 9y ago
        It's not even very hard to imagine. Just go to any web-based diagram drawing service (there's plenty of that), and look how sluggish and crappy it feels even when performing simplest and most basic tasks. Now multiply that crappiness 10x for the complexity of vector drawings (100x if you're doing vector art), and additional 10x for the complexity of the effects vector formats can handle - and you'll get a ballpark of how Inkscape would feel if it was an Electron app.

mikenew 9y ago

There's a branch/package by one of the devs that uses the native menu bar, native copy paste, drag and drop, and a few other things that make it feel like an actual Mac application. No clue why it isn't the official distribution, but it's been that way for years. https://inkscape.org/cs/~su_v/galleries/ https://inkscape.org/cs/~su_v/galleries/

pix64 9y ago
This hasn't been updated in 2 years.
justinclift 9y ago
I used to use that, and for my needs (pretty lightweight) it was fine. Apparently the Inkspace developers were looking for this OSX-native-like version to be further developed before they'd promote it. Which is a shame, as release-early-release-often seems like it would have been a better idea. Oh well. :/

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

jvm 9y ago

I ran into this issue and ended up using Affinity Designer. I was pleasantly surprised, it's actually quite comparable to Adobe Illustrator. It's not open source but at $50 much more reasonable than Adobe.

rootlocus 9y ago
I second this. I've been using Affinity Designer for posters, UI mock-ups, icons, etc. Honestly, I can't use Inkscape at all. I find the interface highly bloated and the whole application generally slow.
- melling 9y ago
  How does Designer compare to Illustrator feature wise, and as far a usability? We already have Illustrator. Is it worth adding Designer?
  - mr_than 9y ago
    I use the two side by side. At times I've found Designer's SVG support actually worked better than Illustrator. Illustrator is definitely faster but there are quite a number of useful pixel/recolouring features in Designer. Generally though the maturity and advanced features (mesh, isolate edit, Pathfinder!) eclipse what Designer brings to the table. I was a long time Fireworks holdout, and Designer is maybe the closest in feel compared to Sketch or Illustrator (and they're copying each other better now). All said, the bang for buck is great though, and UI is way easier than Inkscape I gotta say ;)
    - musha68k 9y ago
      Just another data point: to me Affinity Designer actually seems to render much faster than Adobe Illustrator (on a 2015 Macbook Pro with Intel integrated graphics chipset).
sewer_bird 9y ago
Thanks for this: I didn't know about Designer, and was similarly let down by how less pleasant Inkscape was on Mac, coming from a lovely experience of it on Windows.

audidude 9y ago

One problem is that they are still on Gtk 2.x. There is so much work that was done in 3.x over the last 7 years that improves things. Visual Studio for Mac is also Gtk 2.x, but they (Xamarin at the time) invested heavily in a custom Gtk fork as much of the hacks were not suitable upstream.

samtoday 9y ago
I just launched Inkscape, and noticed the port seems to be done! In Fedora 26, they ship Inkscape 0.92 which uses Gtk+ 3.
- mc- 9y ago
  0.92.x does not use gtk3 (there is an experimental compile flag to use it, but it's still experimental)
  - audidude 9y ago
    You're both right. Fedora enables this option on F26. rpm -qa | grep inkscape inkscape-0.92.1-4.20170510bzr15686.fc26.x86_64 ldd /usr/bin/inkscape | grep gtk libgtkmm-3.0.so.1 => /lib64/libgtkmm-3.0.so.1 (0x00007f12a6a2f000) libgtk-3.so.0 => /lib64/libgtk-3.so.0 (0x00007f12a4dbb000)

Animats 9y ago

I've been very pleased with Inkscape for general draw program use. I use it to create Wikipedia illustrations, since Wikipedia prefers SVG.

test9753 9y ago
For simple vector diagrams, I've found https://www.draw.io https://www.draw.io (similar to MS Visio) to be very convenient. The code is also open source (Apache-2.0): https://github.com/jgraph/draw.io https://github.com/jgraph/draw.io
- hatmatrix 9y ago
  I didn't know about draw.io's license - that is great. I have been enjoying yEd but also looking for other diagramming software since rotating text is difficult in yEd, and it's not free software [2]. [1] https://www.yworks.com/products/yed https://www.yworks.com/products/yed [2] http://yed.yworks.com/support/qa/515/why-not-an-open-source-license http://yed.yworks.com/support/qa/515/why-not-an-open-source-...

jpswade 9y ago

I found the same issue, so promptly moved to use BoxySVG, which I must say is pretty amazingly simple and modern. Sure, it's not open source, but it is free.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

btschaegg 9y ago

I agree that Inkscape is awesome, but the UI still could use some love in some places. What I am regularly missing, for example, is a widget that displays nested groups as intuitively as Adobe Illustrator does. Inkscape gives you a possibility to search for elements with its XML-widget, but that one is really fiddly and doesn't support many really useful usecases (quickly toggling visibility, selecting multiple elements, regrouping by dragging elements out of a group...).

mc- 9y ago
Like the objects dialog in 0.92 ?
- btschaegg 9y ago
  Oh, did I miss out on something? ...I'll have a look at that then, thanks for the hint! :-)

etatoby 9y ago

When I was using OS X, I used to compile my own version using Brew that behaved like a native application. There are flags to do just that, but it's a very lengthy process, because you have to compile GTK and other libraries first. It works well, although there are occasional bugs, such as the shortcut keys using Ctrl instead of Cmd, if I recall correctly.

oddevan 9y ago
You know, I'd be willing to do that. Do you know of a good tutorial on this?
- fkistner 9y ago
  No need to compile GTK, etc. yourself. Homebrew has you covered. brew tap caskformula/caskformula brew install caskformula/caskformula/inkscape Mentioned at the bottom of the page [1]. [1]: https://inkscape.org/en/download/mac-os/ https://inkscape.org/en/download/mac-os/

skykooler 9y ago

GIMP works decently well under OSX. It didn't until recently, though; it used to be the same XQuartz story until they finished the native GTK+ build.

musha68k 9y ago

Save yourself the hassle and buy Affinity Designer – it does a better job of most of what I did before with Adobe Photoshop & Illustrator (or Sketch for that matter). I'm very grateful to my designer friend who recommended it to me. It's 50 Euros... just buy it and get happy :)

tomxor 9y ago

You've just explained why you find it intuitive / better... (familiarity). Inkscape/Illustrator/whatever doesn't really have a layout, it's just: shit all over the place, some in tool palette thingimombobs, some hidden under contextual menus and file menus. Sometimes there is some effort to make mode based or hierarchy give some kind of sense of order but it's always artificial, there are too many tools and there don't need to be. I know you have to learn to love these things when you use them daily, and you can isolate yourself from the most offensive bits through gradual configuration... but when you step back and be objective, cmon, it's a steaming pile o' crap. Oh yeah, and moving to gitlab isn't going to help that.