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Comment by pugio | Hacker News Reader

Inkscape is my go to image editor. The UI is reminiscent of the old Macromedia Fireworks, with a paradigm that feels much nicer (to me) than Photoshop et al.

I downloaded the beta pessimistically thinking that they still wouldn't have native OSX Menu support (I've been using the non-updated 0.91+devel+osmenu fork/branch forever), but was pleasantly surprised to see full OSX integration in this beta. Great job guys!

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I'm used to Affinity Designer, unfortunately Inkscape is very slow for even just ~10 layers of medium complexity shapes on MacOS :-/

While on Affinity, I can have hundred layers without noticeable performance issues.

Sounds like it's caching things? How does the memory usage compare?

I'm not on MacOS but find Inkscape pretty snappy in general, even with big projects.

Perhaps it's not the Layers but the effects? Blur in particular is pretty slow. Have you tried reducing the displayed filter quality? This doesn't effect the image itself, only the display in Inkscape. It's in the render tab in Inkscape preferences.

At View -> Display Mode you can also toggle between full display, display without filters and only outlines. If Inkscape is significantly faster without displayed filters, setting down the display quality will definitely help.

I'm using plain symbols and pen drawing when testing and CPU shoots up to 70% instantly, moving objects are sluggish and every move makes the CPU spike again.

The more curves I have, the more sluggish it becomes.

Do you use MacOS, too?

The very first item on Affinity Designer's feature list [1] is "Pan and zoom at 60fps". You don't generally accomplish this by accident. They apparently wrote the engine from scratch to use hardware acceleration, and be usable on an iPad with a very small amount of available RAM [2].

There's no reason blur, in particular, must necessarily be slow. Everybody (and their phone) has a GPU that's more than fast enough to do that in real-time. I wonder if the (cross-platform) interfaces that Inkscape are using on macOS aren't hardware accelerated. Or if it's using some syscall which is cheap on some platforms and expensive on others.

I haven't done any testing but I agree that Inkscape feels much slower than Affinity Designer.

[1]: https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/designer/full-feature-list/ [2]: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/18079-what...

I use Affinity Designer and Photo and they are very fast even at huge sizes (I do art). But they don't listen to user feedback or suggestions much if at all. AD/P can use OpenGL Vulcan or Metal (I use Metal) and it's amazingly fast for most operations. I also use Artrage 5 and it's abysmally slow probably not optimized for any platform either, probably not much different from Inkscape (though mostly bitmap drawing).

I'm getting 2fps when panning an empty document on macOS...

I love Affinity Designer! I used to use Inkscape, but it has a horrible user interface (typical FOSS software). Paying $50 to buy Affinity Designer with a decent UI is ok for me.

Yeah compared to Affinity, Inkscape is garbage.

I would say Inkscape is even less robust than Gimp.

I thought Inkscape was an alternative to Illustrator and other vector drawing programs, didn't know people were using it for photo editing.

They said image editor, not photo editor. Vector images are still images.

There's a comparison to photoshop.

People use Photoshop where a vector graphics program would be more appropriate because they know and are familiar with Photoshop.

If you just want to crop a photo and add some filters to it, most vector graphics editors can do that and are good enough.

yeah, indeed, strange.. I always use Gimp in those situations. I'm fairly fluent in Inkscape and cropping images is not something I would use it for.

yeah, this is super weird, it's a vector graphics editor, come on people, use GIMP or photoshop for images.

The program is still able to handle it, and I know its features more than GIMP or Photoshop. To me, it's still an acceptable tool.

Thanks for this comment. I will probably download for that reason alone. That said, my goto vector editor is InkPad on an iPad Pro. It's everything I need and nothing I don't.

If you liked Fireworks, try Sketch. It looks like Fireworks, but with those little annoying bits done right. I wish Inkscape copied these interface tricks.

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