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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?

#81
post #74

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…

> For example in Krita you can't resize a crop rectangle with the mouse that holds its aspect ratio I've never used Krita, but I was skeptical that it can't do this, so I just now installed it and gave it a try. It does have this feature! I made a crop rectangle, then right-clicked on it. A little menu popped up, titled "Crop Tool Actions". One of the things in the menu is a checkbox labeled "Lock Ratio", which was u…

NO RIGHT CLICKING! Nobody does a right click on a crop rectangle. Modifier key. Like you keep shift pressed and it preserves the aspect ratio. Nobody will do another click, then select a menu, then whatever. That's the issue. If you have to edit 100s of images these extra you go the menu, then the submenu, then click, then blablabla, then powpowpow, takes a lot of time. Streamline the user experience. You can only make it better if you use it daily and change the things that frustrate you. If these things doesn't frustate you, and do these over and over and over, then you are a robot and not fit for UI/UX design, so easy.

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#82

It's somewhat ironic that the author is essentially proposing a blender-like UI for gimp, considering that blenders UI is one of the most maligned UIs out there. For the record I think the blender UI is pretty genius for an extremely complex graphics program and it could also work with gimp. Also the loud shouting around blenders UI have died down a lot in recent years, which I attribute to 2 things: 1. the great wor…

I got hooked on the 2.78 UI And can't manage to do more than half of what I know blender can do

the bitching is mostly the disconnect from version to version.

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#83
post #8

I will forever be against weird “hidden” menus and even more against the idiotic replacing of clear, obvious text based menuing with bullshit, stupid, mentally handicapped “just memorize what our developers decided these images mean lol Hurr durr”. Absolutely hate this redesign. The correct response to a “too small viewport” for anyone serious is to buy a better monitor with a larger resolution, not to redesign menus…

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.

Menus used to have at least some consistency across programs. If you knew where an option was in one program, it was usually in the same place in another, or at least similar options were in similar places. The UI designers of the past understood that convention trumps invention. You shouldn't need to "discover" something in 10 different ways when you use 10 different programs. Now everyone wants to "innovate in UI design" and there’s no consistency between the programs you use.

It was probably Apple that led the "minimalist UI" trend, but at least Apple have consistency across their applications. The GNOMEs started trying to copy Apple's design cues with Gkt3/GNOME3 but completely missed the mark.

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#84
post #5

> [Search] kinda works when you generally know what you need or how a feature you want could be called I mean, that's how I feel using the GIMP menus. I never know where anything is, and my first guess is usually wrong.

> my first guess is usually wrong

I had the same experience, and searching for answers using keywords was not very effective. There are so many features that the terms I guessed were often a different concept in GIMP, leading to a bunch of irrelevant results.

I have found that ChatGPT solves this problem very well, so I don't even try searching first anymore. I can verbosely explain what I am trying to accomplish, and it tells me "that is called X in GIMP, and here is how to use it: ...".

A recent example is that the Bucket Fill tool was filling in adjacent pixels that were a slightly different color than the one I clicked on. ChatGPT told me this is called the "threshold" and how to change it to 0 so it only filled exact matches. I would have searched for something like "gimp bucket fill sensitivity" or "gimp bucket fill precision", then had to read through a forum answer or the GIMP documentation to see that term.

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#85
post #14

Universal search in UI is cool, and I’m all for it, but it shouldn’t be the only/primary way of accessing tools as tool discoverability is very low. The author tries to deal with this by putting the a menu next to a search bar and putting hints in the bottom menu (which I don’t think would really work here, as raster tools are less selection-specific than 3D tools). Search fixes the speed-of-access issue, but doesn’t…

I started with rhino3d a while ago. I like that everything can be done by typing a command. By default your cursor is in a command field and everything you type instantly searches for a command. There are menu items as well. But once you get used to typing commands its so damn fast.

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#86
The search tool for GIMP is Google. How do I draw a rectangle? Google brings you to https://docs.gimp.org/2.10/en/gimp-using-rectangular.html which starts with "GIMP is not designed to be used for drawing." and then goes on which "However, you may create shapes by either painting them using the technique described in Section 14.1, “Drawing a Straight Line” or by using the selection tools"

At that point you realize that what you really want is MS Paint from Windows 3.1

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#87
post #5

> [Search] kinda works when you generally know what you need or how a feature you want could be called I mean, that's how I feel using the GIMP menus. I never know where anything is, and my first guess is usually wrong.

The worst is Inkscape. They somehow manage to put every option in the last place I look.

I still haven't gotten used to Inkscape's newer UI.

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#88

It's somewhat ironic that the author is essentially proposing a blender-like UI for gimp, considering that blenders UI is one of the most maligned UIs out there. For the record I think the blender UI is pretty genius for an extremely complex graphics program and it could also work with gimp. Also the loud shouting around blenders UI have died down a lot in recent years, which I attribute to 2 things: 1. the great wor…

What does "blender's UI" even mean these days? It's been completely revamped since I last used it, which personally is annoying since I have no idea how to do anything in Blender any more, but objectively is great because the old UI was... challenging... and now it seems to align much better with other professional 3D software.

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#90
post #86

The search tool for GIMP is Google. How do I draw a rectangle? Google brings you to https://docs.gimp.org/2.10/en/gimp-using-rectangular.html which starts with "GIMP is not designed to be used for drawing." and then goes on which "However, you may create shapes by either painting them using the technique described in Section 14.1, “Drawing a Straight Line” or by using the selection tools" At that point you realize th…

> At that point you realize that what you really want is MS Paint from Windows 3.1

Or a drawing program like Krita.

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