Ah, the tool I love and hate. Mostly love though. Let me tell you about the single thing I hate: I open a simple hand-crafted SVG and want to make a simple change. It messes up all my formatting and uses its own weird formatting, with line breaks between attributes. I'd rather it at least put newlines between elements rather than between attributes. Ideally there'd be a "save with minimal edits from the original" but…
That's a pretty absurd complaint. Are you aware of any XML parser ever which preserves the plaintext formatting of the .xml file while magically inserting and modifying an arbitrary amount of XML data anywhere within the document? SVG is just XML. Save your file in Inkscape, and then run `tidy` on it, or whatever you like for format your XML with. (As a fellow hand-crafted XML fan, I feel your pain. But I also know w…
Running `tidy` is of not enough help. I handle the situation by saving into a new file, then copy-paste the changed bits into my hand-crafted SVG and clean them up.
Ideally I try to avoid Inkscape altogether. Which is hard, as it's just too good.