Hi,

I've been using inkscape for a while now and I mostly find it intuitive and straight forward. One thing that I find clumsy is when you click on the layers dialog box anywhere, pressing a key takes you to the 'search' function - I'm not sure exactly what it's called - where you enter text to find a layer. This is fine, however most of the time I want to press a shortcut key such as '+' or '-' to zoom and I find myself in this dialog box have to click out of it.

I may be missing something here but it seems like the only way to get out of the layers dialog is to click on an another window - which can be problematic if you already have a tool selected, or simply a waste of time. Maybe I'm missing something obvious here?

Anyone else have the experience? I switch between layers a lot so it ends up slowing me down.

Edit: ok using the mouse instead a key allows one to zoom without opening the search in the layers dialog. Feels a bit weird, but may be the only way?

Thanks for listening

The Esc key allows you to leave dialogs and switch back to the window. It doesn't always work as expected, but in the case of the layers dialog, I can leave it to use the zoom.

This has been a minor annoyance for me as well. I just try to remember to click into the workspace.

On my win machines, if I escape 2x from the layer search box, I sometimes find that no layers are selected and I would draw new objects in the root. :/

So, for me, click in the workspace it is.

Thanks for the replies. It is only a minor grievance and I just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing a setting or preference that would help.
Ideally, there could be an icon/shortcut for text input on the layers dialog, so as not to 'capture' the keyboard. Of course, the layers feature in general could benefit from some advanced features / workflow improvement.

I'm going to experiment with a tablet soon. No idea how much I'll use it, but if I do use it a lot I should be able to set one of the hotkeys on that to zoom etc.

On my win machines, if I escape 2x from the layer search box, I sometimes find that no layers are selected and I would draw new objects in the root. :/

This caused my a great deal of confusion the first few times I used inkscape.