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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?

#61

It's better than what currently there is but why does open source software have to have such bad UI? what are those lock and checkboxes? a 5 year old could come up with better icons... What's up with the thick lines around UI elements? it all looks so 2008. It sometimes looks to me like absolutely 0 designers are actually involved in open source, at all

GIMP is a power user tool, like Photoshop, or Excel, or a Bloomberg terminal. If you don't need all that, Canva or the photo editor on your phone will offer a simpler UI.

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#62
Does this man ever worked with photoshop? What is he talking about? Of course there is a menu, just like in PS. Of course it is overwhelming at first. The biggest reasont most of the UI/UX sucks, because those who create the program never actually use it day by day. So easy. Use your own program and whenever you get frustrated it shows you that you have done something wrong or awkward and it needs adjustment. Another important thing is to drop the "this must look and feel different than photoshop" stance (more vs less) and it will be a-ok. And don't be afraid to borrow things from the bigheaded ones if that works well.

Krita and Gimp's biggest issue is that most of the tools are implemented in a non intuitive way. Everything is a disorganized mess. And since PS doesn't run under linux, this gets on my nerves.

For example in Krita you can't resize a crop rectangle with the mouse that holds its aspect ratio... WHYYY? And why does the crop tool forgets the previous size values? Little things like these show that the creators NEVER EVER use their own fucking program.

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#63
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 stil…

There's no mention of the issue being keyboard-specific nor patches or comments from mclassen in the issue you linked. Maybe you linked the wrong one?

Looks like a canonical file path (as opposed to dir path) paste handling bug in general, which seems like something worth fixing regardless of one's stance on keyboard paste.

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#64

Does this man ever worked with photoshop? What is he talking about? Of course there is a menu, just like in PS. Of course it is overwhelming at first. The biggest reasont most of the UI/UX sucks, because those who create the program never actually use it day by day. So easy. Use your own program and whenever you get frustrated it shows you that you have done something wrong or awkward and it needs adjustment. Another…

I think that’s right. Every time I go look at it I just marvel at how awful it is, like an alien designing photo editing software by looking at some screen shots and feature lists but never editing a single image.

Compare with Affinity’s software - they are more consistent than present day Adobe but copied all the good, same as Adobe did with Quantel.

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blender has something else. Loads of money compared to Gimp.

Where the money comes from?

https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/blender/9PP3C07GTVRH?hl=en... (hopefully that link works for others.)

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#66
Just in case author happens to read comments: There's this sudden brick wall of understandability in the "Interaction Hints" section. It's not clear what the visual hints are in the screenshot because there's a number of UI elements present. And "obviously" is carrying too much load, you'd have to be be familiar with Blender to know.

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#67

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…

[deleted]

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#68
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A sufficiently complex menu is not really that discoverable, either - you end up having to memorize what category the devs have decided to file a particular function under.

Gimp menu system is reasonably logical (except perhaps some minor exceptions like having options under edit menu (but this is also problem with most of the programs)).

[deleted]

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#69
post #31

changing the GUI for a good reason makes sense, making it look like photoshop doesn't seem like a good idea. Photoshop is an arse to use, just like the GIMP. I just happen to have learnt gimp first.

GIMP lost me when they switched to flat monochrome icons. Well, I still use the old version.

IIRC a bunch of them didn't even just go monochrome, they removed small hints to what it actually did (like little arrows that showed what the transformation actually was). Switching back to the old icons was also the first thing I did.

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#70

Does this man ever worked with photoshop? What is he talking about? Of course there is a menu, just like in PS. Of course it is overwhelming at first. The biggest reasont most of the UI/UX sucks, because those who create the program never actually use it day by day. So easy. Use your own program and whenever you get frustrated it shows you that you have done something wrong or awkward and it needs adjustment. Another…

> Krita and Gimp's biggest issue is that most of the tools are implemented in a non intuitive way. Everything is a disorganized mess. And since PS doesn't run under linux, this gets on my nerves.

Do you mean non intuitive or just not the same as PS. 99% of complaints I see about GUIs (most commonly OSS ones, because people are less likely to criticise choices where they invested money) are that they do not function like another piece of software.

> For example in Krita you can't resize a crop rectangle with the mouse that holds its aspect ratio... WHYYY? And why does the crop tool forgets the previous size values? Little things like these show that the creators NEVER EVER use their own fucking program.

Are you sure? IIRC you just hold down the ctrl key while dragging to preserve aspect. Do I remember wrong?

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