Zoom slider

Yes, an Openoffice like slider would be great.

interactive zoom would be better.
the user would place the cursor at a start point then drag to enclose the area that is to be zoomed in on.
this allows focus on only the pertinent area.

marcus aurelius can't you do that already with the Zoom tool?

Patch to use the spinscale widget for zoom.
Thoughts on how big the widget should be ?

Nice addition.
Due to changes in trunk since the patch, the patch does not apply automatically. Also there might be issues with translation, so I added a context ID.

Regarding the question on the width of the widget.
If one wants a description in a word, the width should be 90 at minimum. This is already a bit wider than before. So I propose the following alternative where the label is shortened to one letter followed by a colon (does not look nice without the colon).

Even better could be no label at all (and let the tooltip speak for itself) and using the default widget width (STATUS_ZOOM_WIDTH).

One piece of functionality that changed is the behavior of middle-clicking on the up & down arrows. It used to double the value on middle-click up and halve the value on middle-click down.

Regarding width, we already gain usable space by having the label inside the widget, so I think with the Z: as opposed to spelling out Zoom would probably work.

Patch to make the middle-click behavior (comment #7) same as before (also applies to PageUp/Down keys).
Width is expanded to 100px - this seems to give enough "usable" space inside the widget to click to jump to zoom value.
Removed the "Z:" label - since it doesnt really add anything and is consistent with other spin scales (Blur/Opacity etc).

Patch from comment #8 tested successfully on Debian Testing, Inkscape trunk revision 12292.
Thanks John!

Committed as r12294.

Follow-up report (request to revert the new slider widget):
- Bug #1184408 “Zoom Slider bar makes it very difficult to type in large zoom values (Win32, bzr r12342)”
  <https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/1184408>

Reverted fix (r12377) until better solution for Windows users is found.