I am used to the Gimp interface and can pretty much do anything that I want. But what I would like to know is how do I move selections or objects from one layer to another in Inkscape.

i pesonally find the layers implementation in inkscape fairly limited, so i try to stay away from it (i dont really do much work that requires using layers anyway...)

AFAIK there are a couple of ways to move a selection and or objects to a different layer:

1. Make your selection and use Layers>Move Selection to layer Above & Layers>Move Selection to layer below. But this is limited cos it only steps one layer at a time....


or you could


2. Make your selection, Edit>Cut, choose the layer that you want and Edit>Paste in place....

but as i said i rarely use layers... other than to lock a background or something...

In addition to ryanlerch's first suggestion, get to know the hotkeys.

Shift + PgUp and Shift + PgDn are your best friends.

@ microUgly

In addition to ryanlerch's first suggestion, get to know the hotkeys.
Shift + PgUp and Shift + PgDn are your best friends.

Umm forgive me for sounding noobish but these do what

@ryanlerch

2. Make your selection, Edit>Cut, choose the layer that you want and Edit>Paste in place....

Will try this approach seems the quickest.

Ok just one more thing where can I edit my keyboard preferences? If it is at all possible

capnhud:

shift+page up - moves the selection to the layer above
shift+page down - moves the selection to the layer below

The Default Inkscape keys are all laid out in a nifty SVG file that can be found in the Help menu:
Help>Keys and Mouse

And if you want to play with changing the key shortcuts around, the file that defines these is:

Your Inkscape Directory/share/keys/default.xml

by default that file is exactly the same as inkscape.xml
inkscape reads default.xml to find the keyshortcuts i think....
there are a couple of other keyprofiles in that directory that you could try (or make your own. )

Found it and edited it to my liking thanks for the heads up. One last thing can I add fonts, gradients, and palettes like in the Gimp?

capnhud wrote:Found it and edited it to my liking thanks for the heads up. One last thing can I add fonts, gradients, and palettes like in the Gimp?

i am not sure about gradients and fonts, but palettes are just gimp palettes and they reside in:

Your Inkscape Directory/share/palettes

just dump the palette you want in there and restart inkscape and it will find them...

Thanks, been reading the manual somewhat to try and find more information. Thanks ryan for the help.

Better than copying the files for palettes is to make a link like
~/.inkscape/palettes -> ~/.gimp-2.x/palettes

This will allow you to use common files and then update a palette only once and share it between both softwares for coherent dezign

If you want to make nice palettes, i suggest you to use agave tool that is really nice, with most of the basic color tools/notions used by designer and painter. This tool save in the same format than gimp/inkscape :

http://home.gna.org/colorscheme/

Better than copying the files for palettes is to make a link like
~/.inkscape/palettes -> ~/.gimp-2.x/palettes

How do you do this?

what OS are you using, that tip above is a linux tip (i think, correct me if im wrong)

capnhud wrote:

Better than copying the files for palettes is to make a link like
~/.inkscape/palettes -> ~/.gimp-2.x/palettes

How do you do this?

The above isntructions is for Linux but it can also be done under Windows (2000, XP, Vista) if your keen. In Windows the feature is called "junction point". You'll need a program like Junction Link Magic to create and manage Junction Points.

Note that I've never tried this myself but in theory it should work flawlessly. It is a geniune feature of the Windows filesystem, MS just don't give you a way to create them.

What about copying palettes from to It would create duplicate files, but still, seems like the easiest way.