There are few tools that are very ingrained in my daily operations, stay for years, and would be hard to replace, like Emacs or Firefox; Inkscape is among them.
Great news! Having to reconnect the USB cable each time is no fun.
But their UX is getting worse with each release. I think they need another Blender-style overhaul
But Blender is just hard to get into. It's not just the updates, though they may not help.
What helped me most was setting aside the time to do a series of ~3 minute videos going back to the absolute basics.
IE how to: rearrange your workspace, use viewport, vertices-edges-faces, transforms-Grab, Rotate, Scale. And more.
AND THEN learning all the keyboard shortcut keys for them.
Blender is so much easier once you learn the common keyboard shortcuts that YOU use all the time. So take those notes.
Bit of exploration of the Blender documentation, which is fantastic but probably 99% used by the automated cognitive tools you asked a query of.
After THAT, you watch/do the tutorials to build basic donut/sword/gadget whatever of interest.
Then you are on your own to do what you want and then the inevitable forum/AI queries about specifics to try to solve the issue you are having.
In my early days, I spent over a week making a game model plane into something I could print. Now I understand the concepts and a few blender tools, it might take me 30 minutes.
Easy? No. It does require a concerted effort. It's not something you just "pick up on the side" like basic photo edits.
But damn, it opens up a whole new world of possibilities...
I'm been playing with Freehand, and the one thing that really stands out to me is the Object dialog. Current vector editors have similar designs, but none are as powerful and straightforward at the same time as Freehand's. The swatch workflow is also pretty rigid, and gives you a good imagination of what the color separations/result would look like.
The ability to do PostScript fills and strokes (and have them live-preview via Display PostScript) in Altsys Virtuoso was flat out _amazing_.
Ages ago, I once used the CMYK adjustment to get a rough preview of a multiple spot ink job à la Cerilica Truism (which you should have the person doing the CMYK stuff look into --- it allowed one to set paper stock colour options and then simulate multiple ink mixes, including spot colours --- also spot types, so there was only a single set of ink mixes, but if a spread had coated paper on one side and uncoated on the other, the appearance matched what one would have had to use two ink swatches for in other apps).
Also, Graphics Find and Replace is invaluable for working on complex files w/ many objects.
It used to be almost unusable with all the UI bugs (can't close tabs when you open them, can't resize the window without panes bugging out or the app crashing, etc).
I get the occasional crash where it just closes completely for no reason, but very rarely in the last year.
Aside from that, I absolutely LOVE Inkscape - there are no better tools if you want to have granular control over the SVG.
Edit: here's another one, not sure if macOS related tho - auto-selecting the parent when clicking the path underneath it. Because of that, I can't use a hotkey to switch the visibility of the selected path on/off (Inkscape switches the visibility of the parent layer instead, affecting everything that's inside).
Anything new from AI assisted port from c++ to plain and simple C?
It seems to me Tikz does the same but programmatically.
It seems to me the Caterpillar does the same but with better offroad capabilities.
That’s one reason to use Inkscape. If I want to draw a design, I have a shape in mind I then try to draw by editing the points as I see them, with instant visual feedback. I don’t want to code in points and have to modify coordinates.
It’s like asking why people use a parametric CAD suite like NX if they could just use OpenSCAD. If you want to model something, seeing it and editing it in the 3D view can be much nicer than editing code.