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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?

#92
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The fundamental difference between Blender and Gimp is that Blender started life as a commercial product, designed by 3D professionals for other pros. Yes, the interface was different and the learning curve hardcore, but it had an internal logic that enabled fast workflows when you’d mastered it. Gimp was designed by open source hackers with no input from professional designers, or seemingly even any interest in thei…

I'm not convinced. The UI in early Blender was as arcane as any I have ever seen, worse than GIMP's by a mile. Contemporary commercial 3D software did not have the same quantity or quality of weirdness. (Remember SoftImage?) The commercial version of Blender failed in the marketplace, and after it was open sourced, it was not taken seriously again for quite a few years.

Blender's dogfooding efforts were a powerful force in both proving that the software was good enough (to make movies) and demonstrating how it could be better (for the animators who made the movies). I'm not aware of any such efforts for GIMP. What I have seen is roadmaps of what improvements they know they need, and timelines of years to improve core infrastructure to the point that their actual goals are within reach. Meanwhile, other software projects (both FLOSS and commercial) race past them and move on to more exotic and exciting features.

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#93
The problems with Gimp have nothing to do with not having a sufficient UI paradigm to contain Gimp's oh-so-precious functionality; it's that the project leadership refuses to consider that tue esoteric universally-loathed UI paradigms they came up with might be worse than the prevailing conventions.

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#94
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I talked to them myself on #gtk on IRC (both on gimpnet in the old days and libera in modern times). Most previous issues with this bug have been removed from the bug tracker(s). This is just the latest one submitted by a helpful dev in channel who discovered it applied to Gtk4 too when I brought up the Gtk3 version this year. Now that they know it's in Gtk4 too they might do something.

To understand how it's keyboard specific you have to know about what features were removed. In the past you could set the file chooser dialog to have either a text entry field or the path-bar mouse buttons as the default. This was through org.gtk.Settings.FileChooser location-mode. While this gsetting still remains gtkfilechooserwidget.c was changed so it no longer respects those settings and always forces only the mouse based path-bar input mode. This means now when a file path is pasted with ctrl-v (or middle mouse click paste?) the entirely wrong function tries to handle it and this function errors out because it's not expecting file path input.

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#95
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The OP doesn't make this absurd claim (search is how you discover things, it can't be the opposite)

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#96
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The linked article talks about a fork created to redesign Gimp's UI, so there were no gatekeepers.

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 l…

Try editing 10 images in a row with Krita and you'll see the issues right away. Layer handling, selection handling and tool placement is cumbersome, to put it mildly. Maybe invite someone who has extensive experience working with photoshop and watch how often he starts to curse or ask for help and whether he uses the gun to shoot himself in the head. Then change things accordingly, if the creators don't use their own…

Not saying you are necessarily wrong about Gimp possibly being able to copy some of the good ideas from Photoshop. However, you basically confirmed what the GP said. If you suggest to put your usual Photoshop user in front of Gimp, without prior experience, then they are bound to walk into unexpected design decisions. Just like a Gimp user would, trying to find things in Photoshop.

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#99
Slightly off topic, but for anybody looking to make the transition from photoshop to gimp, check out this extension: https://github.com/Diolinux/PhotoGIMP

It adjusts shortcuts and a bit of the interface to feel a lot more familiar.

I’ve been using photoshop for a few years and just transitions to gimp a few months ago, and so far I did not miss any of the photoshop functionality.

(I only do personal photography manipulation, no design or any sort of drawing that might need a tablet)

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#100
post #48
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you support discoverability, sleek work areas with minimal interfaces such as search, and power users at the same time? What does that look like?

Menus with lots of options, properly labelled and organized, and displaying keyboard shortcuts next to them, like pretty much any software written in the 90s. Tooltips when you hover over things. Actual documentation built into the software rather than tucked away in a man page or only found in a forum you discovered by searching for your problem. I don't think it's power users these designers are trying to cater for…

> If they were trying to cater for power users they would let power users configure their interfaces to suit them.

Exactly, and both in the immediate UI (like, ctrl-right click on a menu and enter the new shortcuts right there) and in config files to allow for batch search&replace editing

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