Comment 6 for bug 170703

Hi !
I don't think having the ability to select handles would be a mess at all :

Look at Blender.

Just make any random bezier curve, and look at what you have :
Nodes & handles.

(right-)Click on a node, you have the node & both handles selected, so you know you have the whole node.
You can move it, resize it (which actually resizes both hadles distance), rotate it (rotates the handles) etc.
Just like what we have in inkscape.

Now (right-)click on a handle, you have the handle selected, so you know you have only the handle (the node itself & the other handle are non-highlighted).
You can move it, resize it, etc.

Now select both handles from a node : the whole node is highlighted, just like in case 1. It's logical : having both handles selected actually selects the whole node, it feels actually quite intuitive.

Now make a circle and select the handle that folows each node going clockwise (so if you were inside the circle, you could say that the right handles of each node is selected, but not the left ones.
Then you can transform this group of nodes quite intuitively. If you resize them, they'll get further away from the center of the 4 handles (that is, the center of the circle here), which gives a blob aspect to your circle.

All this is quite intuitive and when I got to discover this in blender, I wasn't surprized at all to be able to edit my handles separately from their nodes with the usual tools (grab, rotate, size, etc.)

There's one problem in blender's implementation : it's that a right-click (the usual selection tool) selects the closest handle / node so you can't select a segment in one click like you can in inkscape, but this could be easily fixed by selecting a handle / node only when you click ON IT, not the closest one. This way we would keep the cool "select a segment feature"

But there's also one very cool feature, it's that you have a pointer, which isn't a "physical" object, it's just a purely virtual point that you can place at the center of you selection, on the grid, etc. and then place an object on it.
You can set a handle's position to be on the pointer, which allows you to recopy handle positions from other objects, for example. I used this a lot when working with blender.

As inkscape implements that wonderfull "show node handles" button, the handle-selecting facility would be available only when handles are shown, so this would be even better - in no-handles mode, you'd be sure to allways select the whole node.

Just play a few minutes with blender, and you'll see that it's quite nice and not a mess at all.

Hope I convinced you :-) otherwise I'll have to learn CPP or edit my curves under blender and re-import under inkscape (yuck).