Ability to snap along curves in Node Tool

[JET_Affinity]

Thanks for this! These are the things that "keep me up at night."

JET

 

[JET_Affinity]

Something (yeah, there's always something) that is now needed to work better with the new capability:

1. I have a path selected by the black pointer (Selection Tool). This, of course, displays the infernal bounding box, which only gets in the way when I want to drag a path by one of its nodes.
2. I switch to the white pointer (Node Tool), because I want to drag the whole path by one of its nodes, in order to accurately snap that node to and edge or node of another pre-existing path. But upon merely switching to the white pointer, all the nodes of the wholly selected path become unselected.
3. So I now have to marquee select the whole path all over again with the white pointer, in order to take advantage of the newly added (and much needed) snapping capability.

I see no justification for this. Merely switching to a different tool should not change the selection state of what is already selected. When a path is already selected with the black pointer, switching to the Node Tool should, of course, get rid of the all too-assertive bounding box, but should otherwise leave what is already selected (the whole path) alone. In other words, merely switching to the Node Tool should leave all the path's nodes selected, not deselect all the nodes.

I understand the counter-argument which someone may raise: The assumed purpose of switching to the Node Tool is to manipulate a subset of the path's nodes. But, first, the program has no business making that assumption, especially given the now better snapping behavior. Second, the existing behavior (automatically deselecting all the nodes) causes me to have to make a marquee or individual nodes selection regardless of whether I want to move all the nodes or just a subset of them. If the change I'm asking for were made, I would only have to make a marquee selection when I do want to move only a subset of nodes. And in that situation, I would, of course, have to select the specific nodes I want to address anyway. So having them all always automatically deselected is really no advantage at all.

Some may anticipate what my next argument will be: Now that the Node Tool and the Node Transform Tool have the needed ability to snap to pre-existing nodes and edges, it raises the obvious question: Why the need for both tools? In other words, why can't the Node Tool also be able to do the rotations, skews, and scales that the Node Transform Tool can do? In other other words, why can't I just work with the Node Tool when manipulating paths, and only switch to the black pointer when I do want to manipulate handles of a bounding box, as I can do in other programs?

JET