David.P

Check the Preferences > Performance and look for View Quality.

Thanks! That worked.

Or you could Join Curves before / instead of merging.

I think what people who want this feature want is to simply look at the whole design without any non design elements visible. Select something and change the colour with no blue box getting in the way of seeing how the change is visually. Fitting shapes to fill a particular area with a ... how do I say it... certain 'weight' to balance elements. It is when you are dealing with subtleties that the bounding box can be distracting.
Myself I don't care, I can ignore a lot of stuff, but I can imagine situations where it would ruin the 'flow' of working.
An example for me is the use of a light grey coloured grid, drives me mad. Makes the whole page look bad. Pink, green or red I have no problem with that. Just the way I am wired to my eyes.

While we wait for Affinity to finally introduce a vector pattern fill feature, attached are a few hatches that can be used to fill shapes or enclosed areas, particularly using Inkscape.
These are true tiled hatches, consisting of one line segment and it's bounding rectangle only, which then are tiled to fill any area.
Sadly, Affinity Designer doesn't even seem to support such (externally created) vector fill patterns.  
The issue of seamless vector fills seems to be a bit tricky, as it also has been planned for years in the SVG standard, but still hasn't been implemented.
Inkscape Vector Crosshatch Template.svg

This looks great and indeed is a vector pattern fill.
However it goes totally over my head how this guy did it (see his video attached below).
Thankful for any explanation,
David
Pattern_test.mov

I have yet to use AD a lot, so I am not sure how it works there. In CorelDraw it is not working any good so what I do there is use its Powerclip feature to fill the content with manually tiled objects of size. I do that rather than do pattern, and then pattern fill because of the poor adjustability of the latter that I simply do the powerclip route as it takes same/similar effort and at least let me adjust the content.
Powerclip is when you turn one object into a container of kind, and the content can be wider than the object but the excess isn't shown.
It isn't a replacement to a well made vector fill of course.

While we wait for Affinity to finally introduce a vector pattern fill feature, attached are a few hatches that can be used to fill shapes or enclosed areas, particularly using Inkscape.
These are true tiled hatches, consisting of one line segment and it's bounding rectangle only, which then are tiled to fill any area.
Sadly, Affinity Designer doesn't even seem to support such (externally created) vector fill patterns.  
The issue of seamless vector fills seems to be a bit tricky, as it also has been planned for years in the SVG standard, but still hasn't been implemented.
Inkscape Vector Crosshatch Template.svg

Maybe, but this is such a fundamental feature for so many use-cases that I am shocked it is still not in the product after such a long time. For many people, like me, it is the one thing which is holding back from adopting the product.
I tried creating a box in Illustrator and filling with a simple vector fill of diagonal lines and then imported the file into AD. It imported the file with the box but it is filled with a dithered version of the hatching, which you can't edit.
Incidentally when dragging this box around the screen there was a lot of tearing, whereas in Illustrator it is seamless. Looking into this further I discovered that when dragging it around in Illustrator CPU use never goes over 70%, whereas in AD it goes up to over 400% (iMac 27, Big Sur, 3.7GHz Core i5 with Radeon Pro 580GX) .
I am surprised to think that Illustrator has better and more efficient coding in this area but that is what I see. I also tried filling the box with a simple shade of grey with exactly the same result. This is pretty much the same whether the app is set to use Metal or OpenGL.

You can create a vector fill of diagonal lines directly within AD with the aid of the ‘Power Duplicate’ feature, and then you can clip it to the shape you want to fill, but it isn’t as easily created or as easily adjustable as one would expect from a proper Vector Fill Tool.

There are plenty of free libraries for importing and exporting dxf/dwg files...  most under GNU licencing.
This would take a single afternoon to implement!!! 
example of such libraries
https://github.com/codelibs/libdxfrw
 

Got a further update of the Designer on my Mac. Now I'm on 1.9.2. Of course without DXF support as usual. You are doing really an outstanding job in not choosing what features to implement based on forum thread posting counts. The are not many others ignoring community needs as patiently like you do .. well done!
 
@PurpleFish .. I will try Inkscape next time I have to deal with dxf, thanks for the tip

Probably because it is dead-easy to implement DXF import and export, since DXF is a plain text file containing nothing but number coordinates for lines, circles and such. You could open a DXF file with Notepad, read those plain text measurements and start drawing your DXF with a ruler on plain paper basically right away.

Probably because it is dead-easy to implement DXF import and export, since DXF is a plain text file containing nothing but number coordinates for lines, circles and such. You could open a DXF file with Notepad, read those plain text measurements and start drawing your DXF with a ruler on plain paper basically right away.

Some users think it's an AI killer, Affinity have never said that. It has a small subset of AI's features and that may always be the case. If it meets your requirements then great but ignore the people who get carried away pretending it can replace AI for everyone. You just have to look at the requests to see where it's lacking. Of course it does kill AI on price and being locked out of your work if you don't want to keep paying their tax, which is why their subscription model is horrible.
If you're thinking of AI for iPad you must have AI for the desktop too as it's part of the subscription, you can't get the iPad version separately. So use that unless the iPad is your only device. AI on the iPad is pretty basic at the moment and it's unlikely to ever be feature comparable to the desktop version and unless Apple change their direction in some areas it's impossible to be.
 

While we are waiting for a vector fill function to appear in Affinity Designer, does any of you guys have a tip on how to get as close as possible to that ingenious function of PhotoLine:
...i.e. a fill bucket that fills areas of bitmaps with vector fills (!) and creates a new vector layer for this purpose -- totally brilliant.
 
I am aware that probably no other program can do this at the moment, therefore I'm looking for a simple tool that can fill unicolored (say, empty white) areas of bitmaps with bitmap hatch lines, whereby this bitmap hatching however must be renderable with variable width, and with high resolution. Thus, it is not sufficient if the hatch lines are 1 pixel wide, as is the case with most bitmap editors.
In other words, how do I fill a uni-colored area of a bitmap with a high-resolution, scalable bitmap hatch -- ideally with variable line width, variable angle, and variable spacing?
Thanks for any ideas on which graphics/bitmap editor can do this!

Hi MEB,
Thank you for your reply. Although symbols are a very powerful feature is not what I would need to accomplish the task.
I work as 3D visualizer and sometimes I get from clients ready render where I need to put e.g. on a wall lines simulating wood panels, and here I would need a vector fill with the ability to change the size exactly like the Bitmap in the fill tool behave. I'm aware of the Procedural texture available in Photo beta, but I would love to have the vector power of that feature over Designer.
PhotoLine has this feature where the user can add/create any pattern and the objects will fill with it in a extremely easy way. Maybe it worth for you to check it out, because I'm an Serif products sucker
Could this topic be moved to feature request?

yes yes yes! 
The possibility to import CAD drawings into Affinity Designer without creating zillions of polyline points from perfect Bezier curves and circles is an absolute dream feature. 
I currently use an ancient version of Visio (2003) which has the amazing ability to do exactly that, i.e. remove 99% of the polyline points and converting everything back to pure Bezier perfection. 
Affinity Product Managers, please get moving! 

I agree 100%. In fact I have bought the package, and it’s quite useful.
However, the point about the skimpy basic transform operations goes back to at least 2017. There have been inquiries from paying customers all the way through, because these are BASIC tools for a vector design application, going all the way back to Fontographer, the grandmother of Aldus/Macromedia/Adobe Freehand (RIP). I was a beta tester in the late 1980s for Freehand, and Fontographer before that!
But yes. Please support innovative small developers.
But developers, communication is the key... What UP!?!
Thanks!
PF
@ideaswords (IG)
alphabets.com (fonts)
fraterdeus.com
 

Hi
For the meantime. There is an affordable option
that is maybe not so well known.

But sorry its only for PC.
Have a look at magix (xara) graphic designer , it has
the tools you want and is a good vector companion
for Affinity Designer.
Here is a Post from me, where I show some of its features.
magix (xara) graphics designer features
 
Greetings
2dpainter

I can't believe we are still waiting for basic warping tools not to mention (dare we dream) an envelope tool and autotrace. It's clear the Affinity team spread themselves too thin launching Publisher before finishing the basic feature set in Designer.

"Free vector perspective" and "Free vector extrusion" is a MUST for many professional users.
Without this function, the program can only be used by artists.
I work as a technical illustrator and would be happy to bury CorelDraw and Illustrator.
Just like Affinity Photo has replaced Photoshop.
But unfortunately this is NOT possible without these functions.
I'm looking forward to future updates and uninstall the actual designer demo again...  : - (((

+1 We absolutely need this to get rid of this shitty buggy Illustrator I'm just using as a vector shape editor, and for some vector patterns. 
 

+1
And vector based one please, unlike Photo's Perspective/Mesh Warp.
Of course implementing it to Photo also would be nice.