I’ve been curious about Corel for a while, so I may need to bite the bullet and get it sometime.
Illustrator is absolutely a byzantine mess lmao. The reason it’s so favored (I don’t want to say loved, but favored) is because of the depth of features, and also how fast it is to work in once you’ve learned it’s bizarre interface.
Some of it is definitely unfamiliarity, but I always find when using Affinity that things that are a single click or a hotkey + click in illustrator are multiple clicks without a hotkey in affinity. In isolation not a huge difference, but when you do it full time it adds up.
Your workflow in the main Corel suite apps is completely customizable. It has a default layout and shortcut configuration as well as a preset that it comes with which allegedly apes Illustrator’s, but you can if you prefer redefine almost everything.
You can choose what tools go in your toolbars, which options show in your drop down menus, where those toolbars are located, and you can even reconfigure the keyboard shortcuts for literally every command, including adding shortcuts to commands which don’t have one by default. I think the only limitation is that they can’t conflict with inbuilt OS hotkeys, e.g. you can’t bind anything to Alt + F4.
You can also perform macros and script the main suite apps using VBA which is only mildly opaque, but opens up the possibility of a world of batch processing tricks if you feel like going down that rabbit hole. I prefer to use Imagemagick for that sort of thing, personally.
I’ve been curious about Corel for a while, so I may need to bite the bullet and get it sometime.
Illustrator is absolutely a byzantine mess lmao. The reason it’s so favored (I don’t want to say loved, but favored) is because of the depth of features, and also how fast it is to work in once you’ve learned it’s bizarre interface.
Some of it is definitely unfamiliarity, but I always find when using Affinity that things that are a single click or a hotkey + click in illustrator are multiple clicks without a hotkey in affinity. In isolation not a huge difference, but when you do it full time it adds up.
Your workflow in the main Corel suite apps is completely customizable. It has a default layout and shortcut configuration as well as a preset that it comes with which allegedly apes Illustrator’s, but you can if you prefer redefine almost everything.
You can choose what tools go in your toolbars, which options show in your drop down menus, where those toolbars are located, and you can even reconfigure the keyboard shortcuts for literally every command, including adding shortcuts to commands which don’t have one by default. I think the only limitation is that they can’t conflict with inbuilt OS hotkeys, e.g. you can’t bind anything to Alt + F4.
You can also perform macros and script the main suite apps using VBA which is only mildly opaque, but opens up the possibility of a world of batch processing tricks if you feel like going down that rabbit hole. I prefer to use Imagemagick for that sort of thing, personally.
That’s definitely good stuff. Affinity is also lacking in interface customization I’ve found.