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Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

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Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile gimp probably has lower % usage rate than it did 20 years ago. Improvements are needed, and this is just menus in a popup box anyway

> just menus in a popup box anyway Please don't do this. You know that isn't true. If someone wants menus in a pop up box, you can simply hide the menu bar until the user presses Alt (or F12 depending on your OS's convention). Inventing an entire new weird system for pure novelty while saying "fuck you" to accessibility for disabled people... is just not okay behavior.

How does that inhibit accessibility?

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#52
post #45

This is a terrible idea. The menu bar works great, integrates with shortcuts, and gives 100% discoverability. Anyone who wants to get rid of it is a bad developer and a bad person.

how is discoverability 100% if you - can't search - don't have 100% functionality

Search is the opposite of discoverability for all the reasons covered in this thread and in the OP.

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#53
post #39
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gtk3 and Gtk4 have been ...well, gimped, and don't have many features. They've been removed in Gtk3/4 by GNOME developers because their DE does not prioritize things like keyboard entry (as compared to mouse use, see gtkfilechooserwidget.c in gtk3/4 not supporting keyboard based pasting of file paths without errors, https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/5872 ). Gtk2 hasn't fallen victim to this slow erosion of…

I doubt breakages like the one you linked are deliberate, there's just a severe lack of manpower. My firsthand knowledge of such things is quite stale nowadays, but I get the impression the RH desktop group is barely on life support at this point. That GTK4 happened at all strikes me as surprising, but could be interesting long-term in terms of modernized GPU support for the toolkit attracting new usage/developers. T…

Right. The example I gave, gtkfilechooserwidget.c, is such a mess of spaghetti code that the remaining Gtk developers don't want to touch it. Despite me bringing it up with them once per year and even providing a partial patch to work off of. But of course that didn't stop them from messing with it in 2014 and breaking it and leaving it in a broken state. The developer that broke it, mclassen, is still there and still explicitly says not having keyboard filepath paste is not a bug. Despite it giving an error message.

re: Gtk4, they're already moving on to Gkt5 (wayland only though https://www.phoronix.com/news/GTK5-Might-Drop-X11).

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> just menus in a popup box anyway Please don't do this. You know that isn't true. If someone wants menus in a pop up box, you can simply hide the menu bar until the user presses Alt (or F12 depending on your OS's convention). Inventing an entire new weird system for pure novelty while saying "fuck you" to accessibility for disabled people... is just not okay behavior.

How does that inhibit accessibility?

[deleted]

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#55
Universal search is great, as is the overall command pallette idea, every app should have it

Althout the usual menu navigation mechanism should also stick around since it provides consistent invocation of a command with a sequence of keybinds (like File, Open). Fuzzy search doesn't do that since you can match something else. Key combos require too much memorization

(though it doesn't have to be the typical horizontal menu at the top, you could have a "modal" navigation mode in the same command pallette)

And to answer the question: of course it's possible, just highly unlikely

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#56

This is a terrible idea. The menu bar works great, integrates with shortcuts, and gives 100% discoverability. Anyone who wants to get rid of it is a bad developer and a bad person.

It would not shock me to learn that GIMP has been a multi decade study to find out how bad a UX has to be before the FOSS community starts to care.

UX affordances are different when the price is zero. I learned GIMP the hard way, first because of Photoshop's pricing, and second because Photoshop's UX wasn't that much cleaner when it came to doing anything outside of trivial layer operations.

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#57

Excuses abound. "There are too many features" So? Do the work. Organize them. "GTK doesn't have xxx, doesn't allow yyy, we have to wait until GTK 5 comes out..." No? Just do the work. Add those features to GTK itself or find a workaround. Open-source is built one patch at a time, so a big rewrite can never happen. But what's worse, to me, is that people build up this cognitive dissonance that it's some framework's fa…

Nobody is stopping you from contributing. A lot of FOSS projects could do a lot of amazing things if they had enough people who "just do the work".

That's too simplistic of a view, there are way too many gatekeepers with poor UI design sensibilities which won't just merge your "just done the work to improve UI" contribution, which in turn leads to lower chances getting people to contribute such improvements

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#58
Horizon EDA is really fantastic and the first usable open source EDA tool I've used. (I've not tried LibrePCB yet so that may be ok, but I've tried all the others; they all have awful UX including Kicad. A lot of the commercial tools have insane UX too - look up how you copy & paste in Eagle.)

Solvespace is the only usable open source CAD software I've found and I have tried all of them. Unfortunately it has some awkward limitations (no bevels or fillets is probably the biggest).

If he can take the excellent Solvespace constraint solver and make something usable that would be amazing!

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#60

This is a terrible idea. The menu bar works great, integrates with shortcuts, and gives 100% discoverability. Anyone who wants to get rid of it is a bad developer and a bad person.

It would not shock me to learn that GIMP has been a multi decade study to find out how bad a UX has to be before the FOSS community starts to care.

GIMP has one of the best user interfaces of all community driven open source software. I frankly can't think of any that are better, now that Firefox followed Chrome in hiding all its most important features.
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