I have been using merkaartor a lot, I find it to be the best OSM program for laying out streets based on yahoo imagery, but I feel the interface could be improved a little. I do plan to work on it, but of course if someone already familiar with merkaartor wants to do any of these, it'd be faster :-) When laying out a way/road, when one presses ESC or goes back to selection mode, the way one just laid should be selected, probably with keyboard focus on the Properties Dock. Adding/modifying tags is I think a very common task after one lays a way, and it helps when laying a way that shares segments with others. Is it possible to download just items visible at low zoom levels, to get a bearing? This downloading would not remove the 'downloaded area' shade, but it'd be great for finding your way around. Most keyboard shortcuts are combinations, when there is no need. Creating a road could be 'r', creating a node 'n', etc. Also, ctrl+v could be 'merge paste' and ctrl+o 'overwrite paste' (at least I find merge paste to be the most usual action). I have modified this and been working this way, my hand is in much better shape :-) Of course, the ability to change shortcuts would be a better solution, but that would require a lot of code. When selecting multiple items with shift, clicking on an empty area (while holding shift down) should not clear the selection. If one wants to clear the selection pressing ESC or releasing shift and then clicking on an empty area are just fine ways of doing that. What does 'download more' even do? Is it the same as opening the usual download dialog and then pressing enter? The purpose is not clear, and if it does just that, I don't see the need of using a two key combination over two keys in sequence. When looking at an area at a zoom level (say, the scale shows '2 km') in which some items can't be seen, invisible nodes should not be selectable (at least by clicking, maybe area selection makes sense?). It makes it harder to actually select what you're looking at. Would it be possible to shade areas over time? So that if one downloaded an area two days ago, it should probably be marked as outdated. I can't think of any other issues right now, truth is I love merkaartor :-) Btw, I don't think I have mentioned this before, but I have merkaartor working on a laptop with just 32MB of RAM, it gets a bit slow when using yahoo imagery but works just fine otherwise.
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