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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?

#181

Post by thomastjeffery »

jimmaswell wrote: post #171
thomastjeffery wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 producti…

GIMP's UI is perfectly fine to me. I frequently use it for editing, design, and even drawing, and I have no desire to use other programs instead. What's so bad about it specifically?

Every time you want to do a thing with the GIMP, you have to go find the specific thing-doer. That's not a really big deal, so long as you can remember where it is or what it is called; but it's really not good tool design.

To contrast, Blender has neatly organized every feature contextually. There are specific modes for organizing objects, editing meshes, sculpting, UV painting, etc. that each present their own smaller tailored UX. Everything that is an option (something you would edit with a text box) is under the properties window, in a contextually-organized tab. The entire structure of Blender's UI/UX is organized to match the conceptual UX of the tools it provides.

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#182

Post by e12e »

There's also photoGimp:

https://github.com/Diolinux/PhotoGIMP

But it's interesting if we can get FOSS Gui toolkits that allow for different approaches to menu/toolbar/discovery where the user can easily adjust and select how things should work - like readline Emacs/vi selection on steroids for Gui.

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#183

Post by CamperBob2 »

jpavel2 wrote: post #160
CamperBob2 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or DeluxePaint II from the early 1990s. I still haven't seen a truly-adequate replacement for that. Every time someone tries to create one, they begin with good intentions and end up with a bad Photoshop clone.

If you're a DeluxePaint fan, then GrafX2 is the way to go these days.

Eh, maybe not looking for something quite that faithful to the original. But good to know!

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#184

Post by janalsncm »

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…

There’s a huge amount of head room to improve search though. For each of the items we can add all sorts of synonyms and descriptions so that users at any level can find the tool they’re looking for.

And we can even add crude customization to the search. Gimp can easily remember the prefix-tool click pairs, so that you don’t even need to type “cropping tool”, if you type “cr” Gimp will remember which tool you clicked last time.

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#185

Post by InCityDreams »

Euphorbium wrote: post #166
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.

Portable versions exist.

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#186

Post by jimmaswell »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #181
jimmaswell wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GIMP's UI is perfectly fine to me. I frequently use it for editing, design, and even drawing, and I have no desire to use other programs instead. What's so bad about it specifically?

Every time you want to do a thing with the GIMP, you have to go find the specific thing-doer. That's not a really big deal, so long as you can remember where it is or what it is called; but it's really not good tool design. To contrast, Blender has neatly organized every feature contextually . There are specific modes for organizing objects, editing meshes, sculpting, UV painting, etc. that each present their own sma…

For me, I find that modality in Blender annoying and confusing.

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#187

Post by flas9sd »

corkybeta wrote: post #79

Unity 7 HUD could search the menubar of any application. I was quite good at guessing the name of the function I wanted, far better than I was at finding it in menus. It looks like MATE, XFCE and i3 still have this. https://github.com/ubuntu-mate/mate-hud https://jamcnaughton.com/2015/10/19/hud-for-xubuntu/#jp-caro...

The global menu top-bar and the HUD application search was what I missed most when I went with the flow and settled in GNOME >36ish.

Here some more screenshots for the uninitiated (with search used on GIMP in the first two screenshots): https://imgur.com/a/5XlgTO3

And the official docs: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Unity/HUD

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#188

Post by michaelmrose »

Almondsetat wrote: post #137
michaelmrose wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't a good indication that gimp can do as well

It actually is. In fact it mighty be the proof that throwing everything away and writing a new version from scratch might even be preferable

An analysis of a particular project includes its scope, existing code, existing developer resources, the time they have available, the things they themselves are familiar with/good at. Any analysis that involves purely looking at a competing project is probably not even wrong.

The gimp project has provided a decent and useful tool for about 28 years whereas most new projects started from scratch die shortly. A from scratch rewrite would be a massive undertaking which might exceed the available resources/skills and might simply kill a useful project rather than producing a better one.

A glib well this guy did it is not an analysis.

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#189

Post by jeroenhd »

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?

Krita is great for drawing, but it's no photo editor. It probably shouldn't be, either, that's more GIMP's space.

In my experience, Paint.NET walks a very fine line between "more complex than MS Paint" and "GIMP/Photoshop/Photopea levels of complexity". Great for altering screenshots and applying filters, but not as overwhelming as a dedicated artist's tool.

I'd say Pinta serves a purpose very similar to Paint.NET on Linux. It's it quite as polished as Paint.NET is, but it's still a good balance when KolourPaint is too simple and when GIMP is overkill.

Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

#190

Post by KaiserPro »

hurryer wrote: post #77
KaiserPro wrote: post #23

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.

I'm curious how you use gimp. Do you use mathy/programming/terminal kinds of editing - stuff applied over the whole image with little mouse usage and mostly setting dialog parameters. Or do you do little edits with the mouse, painting masks, selecting regions with the mouse, and generally using the mouse/pen a lot?

I have an old wacom tablet, so its painting masks mostly. back in the early days, I did all the things that photoshop 6 could do. Along with a brilliant plugin called resynthesiser[1] which I am horrified to find out is 23 years old.

I've never really used the scripting functions apart from applying global effects.

Nowadays I use it until I need illustrator hard enough to move to the mac downstairs. but most of my photo editing is now done in lightroom.

[1]https://github.com/bootchk/resynthesizer

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