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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?

#121
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…

Universal UI search is great, and at this point it should be present in all but the simplest applications. I first saw it introduced in Google Docs, and it's precisely for things you suspect exist, but it's not even remotely clear which menu, submenu, or dialog it's in. (Apple OS Settings is another great example of it.) E.g., you want to apply a hanging indent in Docs? Just type "hanging" into the menu search, and i…

macOS has had the ability to search menus for what seems like a decade. It should be a feature of the toolkit, not something apps need to implement themselves. This doesn’t extend to other UI elements (like System Prefs/Settings), but I agree that it should (and again, should be a toolkit feature).

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#122
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, an…

> ChatGPT told me

ChatGPT didn't tell you. It scrapped an answer off a forum and regurgitated that to you after applying a language transform. It's second result on DDG for "gimp fill tool border" -- https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/42621/hard....

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#123
All these programs like GIMP, Blender, Dune, should split into two.

There should be a library that has the functionality and data structures to manipulate data. The UI should be a separate project with different people.

There could be multiple GUI's for the same project or same GUI framework for multiple projects.

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ma…

> NO RIGHT CLICKING! Nobody does a right click on a crop rectangle. Well, previous commenter just did it. So that just mean that your peremptory decrees are just that. Peremptory and not really universal.

The comment you’re replying to is pretty explanatory and insightful. Do you have anything worthwhile to add here?

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#125
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ma…

Modifier keys were the first thing I tried (because that's how I learned to do it in GIMP and Inkscape when I was in high school). When that didn't work, right-clicking on the crop box was the next thing I thought to try. It's a total of 2 clicks: right click to open the menu, then move the mouse down 6 entries, then left-click on the checkbox. But also, it's my understanding that Krita is not a photo editor, but rat…

> It's a total of 2 clicks: right click to open the menu, then move the mouse down 6 entries, then left-click on the checkbox.

Ok “2 clicks” is a misleading summary for moving down 6 menu items, and in the end this is an eternity compared to a modifier key.

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this is why you will never reach a decent audience for that program

Alternatively it might be the fast that its budget is literally millions of times smaller and with a reasonable budget one would actually hire people instead of hoping random forum talk found its way to implementation via diffusion.

Photopea was developed by a single programmer, runs on the web and it’s leagues more usable than GIMP

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#127
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Confirming what the GP said? This is all misdirection. Bottom line the GIMP UI/UX is garbage. There are extremely few people that have used a variety of image editing tools and claim GIMP is actually better. That’s all that matters really. This isn’t some rhetorical exercise.

The previous poster was talking about Krita (and the one before that Krita and Gimp) and while I agree with some of the criticism of gimps UI, I stand by my comment a lot of that criticism is based around "it is not like program X, that I'm used to".

I mentioned it in a different post, blender is the prime exhibit for this, its UI received even more criticism than gimps. Now that it has become the (or one of the) most popular 3d modelling tool, most of these voices disappeared, because it has become the first entry point and people are not used to some other way of working anymore.

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#128
post #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.

Or Paint.NET, which does maintain aspect ratio on shift.

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#129
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…

Universal UI search is great, and at this point it should be present in all but the simplest applications. I first saw it introduced in Google Docs, and it's precisely for things you suspect exist, but it's not even remotely clear which menu, submenu, or dialog it's in. (Apple OS Settings is another great example of it.) E.g., you want to apply a hanging indent in Docs? Just type "hanging" into the menu search, and i…

Ubuntu Unity DE used to offer this for all GTK apps through the HUD. You could hit alt and type to get to the menu item you need.

Gnome turned out to be a poorly thought-out opinionated mess, learning all the wrong lessons from Apple's work.

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#130
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

Wouldn't it be accurate to say that as far as GUI toolkits the gate keeping is really just GTK? Few seem to complain about QT being to minimalist.
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