There are various workarounds mentioned on those sites, but they’re all a little clunky, to say the least. This issue is well known to MacOS users of Inkscape, and has been reported on Launchpad at least twice, has its own entry in the Inkscape FAQ, and also crops up on the main Inkscape forum. If you get lucky some might appear where you can use them, but enough will go missing that it makes working with the program virtually impossible for anything but the simplest of uses. The same with the Fill & Stroke dialog, the Inkscape Preferences, the Align & Distribute dialog, and all the others. Open the Document Properties dialog and there’s a good chance it will be placed at some obnoxious coordinates that render it invisible to the user. This manifests itself in Inkscape as dialogs disappearing into the ether before you ever get a chance to see them. The biggest problem with XQuartz on a multi-screen setup is that it has an annoying tendency to place new windows off-screen. At my new job they suffer from the delusion that more screens are better, so I have to work with a 3-screen arrangement that would make an air traffic controller proud.

Unfortunately XQuartz has more than a few “issues” – not least of which is a significant problem with multi-screen setups.

For most releases, therefore, the Mac offering is a straight port of the Linux version, and uses XQuartz as its X Server. Whilst Inkscape is available for the Mac, there is no maintainer to release native builds. Just recently I’ve switched jobs and have to use a Mac as my day-to-day work machine, rather than the Linux box I’m used to. So much so that I use it in the creation of my cartoons and comic strips, and have been writing a monthly column about it in Full Circle Magazine for over six years now! My go-to editor for vector images is Inkscape.

Inkscape window