Inkscape adds handles to corner nodes after node deletion

Question

In Inkscape, when I have the following:

If I remove the red node, the neighboring nodes magically get handles, I guess because Inkscape tries to keep the appearance with fewer nodes, resulting in this:

What I want instead is for the two nodes to stay as corner nodes with no handles, just like this:

I can obviously achieve that by selecting the nodes and clicking the "convert to corner" tool, but can it be done directly in one step? It would be great if the "delete node" tool had an option in that regard.

Answer 1

Hold Ctrl and press the Del key to delete the node.

If you already have the handles hold Ctrl and click the round ends of the handles to remove them. That way you don't need to move the mouse to the toolbar.

Answer 2

Hold Ctrl while deleting nodes to make Inkscape not try to preserve the shape of the curve. If you want to make this behavior the default, open the preferences for the node-tool (double-click its icon to open it directly) and disable the 'Deleting nodes preserves shapes' option. Note that holding Ctrl when deleting a node still gives you the opposite behavior, i.e. it'll temporarily enable it again.

Next, sometimes it works better to select one of the segments the node is connected to, using the 'Delete segment between two non-endpoint nodes' button in the toolbar and then deleting the node.