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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?

#161

Post by phendrenad2 »

alpaca128 wrote: post #32
phendrenad2 wrote: post #7

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".

"Nobody is stopping you from contributing" is such a classic deflection. I don't know why people still rely on this old copy-pasta. First of all, who says I want to contribute? Maybe I'm perfectly happy using Photoshop. Is my opinion invalidated simply because I'm not a GIMP user? That's illogical. Secondly, actually, a lot of people would stop me from contributing. I just made the case that only a full rewrite would fix this situation. Do you think that the GIMP maintainers are going to be happy if I drop a full rewrite on them? Or do you disagree that only a full rewrite can fix GIMP? Make some claim, don't just fall back on your list of FOSS fanboy deflections.

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#162

Post by 123pie123 »

b5n wrote: post #120

Just to contrast the negativity here I'd like to say that GIMP is great software, and I really appreciate all the hard work that has been put into it over the years. It's powerful, easily scriptable, and I'm eternally grateful for everyone's contributions to the project. https://www.gimp.org/docs/

it is a great tool I've been using for over 3 years

and soo many UI features are a pain - the main one for me is using text / fonts, it feels like it's designed to fight you

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#163

Post by ruinthemagic »

crazygringo wrote: post #152
jonhohle wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

> macOS has had the ability to search menus for what seems like a decade. Wow, TIL. Talk about a hidden feature. So it turns out it's under the "Help" menu, and it just says "Search". I had always assumed that this searched help topics, not menus. But it's also pretty miminal, seemingly without support for synonyms or features inside of dialog boxes -- e.g. if you type "pref" it won't find "Settings". It also doesn't…

> It also doesn't have a keyboard shortcut to trigger it

command + shift + ?

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#164

Post by phendrenad2 »

alpaca128 wrote: post #96
eviks wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I didn't see the GIMP project speaking up when Glimpse was accused of being "woke". And also, there's zero chance that the GIMP project would ever switch to the Glimpse codebase. Forking things usually results in the original thing persisting forever out of spite for those who dared to fork it.

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#165

Post by stuaxo »

crazygringo wrote: post #73
542458 wrote: 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…

Someone added this to Gtk 2 and 3 apps, but the mechanism if used isn't there in Gtk 4.

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#166

Post by Euphorbium »

pmontra wrote: 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…

The only tutorial gimp needs is how to uninstall it, and how to remove it from the distribution.

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#167

Post by thomastjeffery »

Hemospectrum wrote: post #92
pavlov wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fo…

> The UI in early Blender was as arcane as any I have ever seen, worse than GIMP's by a mile.

That's just not true at all. GIMP's UI has no redeeming workflow. Even if you master it, you must still constantly navigate it's clunky menu of features.

Blender 2.x had an intentional UX flow. When you mastered it - which really wasn't nearly as difficult as whatever work you were doing with it - you could be very productive.

Blender 3.x didn't really change that flow. It only added some optional visual interface for the people who don't already know the keybinds.

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#168

Post by johnchristopher »

Zambyte wrote: post #151
EspressoGPT wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched to macOS several years ago and the only thing I still miss from Windows is something like Paint.NET.

What's wrong with Krita?

I don't know about the Mac version but I find the Linux version a bit on the slow side and the interface look and feel is a bit off to me but I chalk it up to "that's because I am not used to it and I have decades of light photoshop usage ingrained in my brain".

But don't get me wrong. Krita is awesome and it's a better substitution to Photoshop than Gimp is.

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#169

Post by thomastjeffery »

nabla9 wrote: post #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.

That's true for literally all software.

We would be much better off if GUI was a replacement for the shell instead of a replacement for every individual shell utility.

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#170

Post by pavlov »

Hemospectrum wrote: post #92
pavlov wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fo…

There was a lot of completely esoteric design software for workstations in the 1990s. Softimage was a paragon of user-friendliness, so it’s a high bar for comparison. (I still miss Softimage XSI and resent Autodesk for buying and then killing it.)

The Blender dogfooding effort is a reflection of the team’s background in actual 3D production and their commitment to a long-term dialogue with this userbase. Gimp never had that.

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