Customizing Inkscape

Change keyboards shortcuts

In Edit > Preferences > Interface > Keyboard Shortcuts, you can either select one of the predefined keymaps, or you can define your own keyboard shortcuts and save them. The shortcuts that you change will be saved in the file default.xml in your user Inkscape preferences' "keys" directory.

You can also manually edit the file <Inkscape install directory>/share/keys/default.xml, or manually add a custom keys/default.xml in the user Inkscape preferences directory to define new shortcuts or remap (override) shortcuts from the shared keymap file.

In order to share the same shortcuts as other softwares, following configuration files are shipped with Inkscape (look at the <Inkscape install directory>/share/keys/ folder):

You can find a list of the available keymaps either in the Inkscape preferences, in the dropdown, or in the Inkscape git repository.

Change the user interface

Change icons

Icons are all in an icons.svg file located in <Inkscape install directory>/share/icons/. It can be overwritten or modified by the user (be sure of what you do).

Alternatively, a custom icons/icons.svg file can be loaded from the user Inkscape preferences directory (it will override existing icons from the shared icons file, and fall back to icons from the shared icons file if some are missing in the custom one).

Examples of existing icons.svg:

• Default one from the Inkscape repository;
• a Tango Icon Set for Inkscape can be sent in the <Inkscape install directory>/share/icons/ directory, you can rename it.
• SimpleGrey Inkscape theme by Scnd101.

From Inkscape 0.93 onwards, Inkscape's icons are no longer taken from the icons.svg file. Instead, the application looks them up by name from the system, in the "normal" way, as described by the Freedesktop standard. In brief, you can now just install SVG (or PNG) files with the appropriate names into your <Inkscape install directory>/share/icons/ folder.

Then you can select your favorite icon theme in Edit > Preferences > Interface > Icon theme.

Change the Interface Theme

In GTK, a theme is defined in a css' files. You can find an example under <Inkscape install directory>/share/inkscape/themes/Minwaita-Inkscape/.

You can add your own theme, built and structured like the example theme, into your user preferences' 'themes' directory. It will then become available in Edit > Preferences > Interface > Theme.

Changing Colors of Canvas Handles

You can do that by copying the file node-handles.css from <Inkscape install directory>/share/inkscape/ui/ to the folder ui in your user preferences directory and then editing the copied file (since Inkscape 1.4).

Changing Menus

You can do that by copying the file menus.ui from <Inkscape install directory>/share/inkscape/ui/ to the folder ui in your user preferences directory and then editing the copied file.

Changing Toolbars

You can do that by copying the corresponding file toolbar-*.ui from <Inkscape install directory>/share/inkscape/ui/ to the folder ui in your user preferences directory and then editing the copied file.

You can use any action that does not require user input as a command.