GIMP is still a Gtk2 program.
It's still ironic to me that the program that GTK was made for and that popularized the toolkit, haven't managed to move to its latest version yet.
They can port GIMP to the QML-based UI framework used by Muse 4.
Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?
211–220 of 306 posts
Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?
#212I'm surprised there's uncertainty about how Gimp should be redesigned. Just copy Photoshop! Select tools on the left, configure the current tool at the top, global options on the right. Affinity does this and nobody complains. Thanks to MacOS help search, we even already have the command search that this video proposes. And it has interaction hints too. Gimp isn't more complex than Photoshop. We don't need it to rein…
Photopea did this, and on web
Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
> GIMP is not designed to be used for drawing And yet they include a brush tool and a pencil tool - as far as I can recall, the brush tool responds to tablet pressure levels. But _not even their own devs_ can't explain logically why a rectangle or a circle drawing tool is a no-no. And go forbid if you criticize that fact in front of them.
Pony up some substantial money and make it contingent on meeting guidelines. Unless prefer to offer vague suggestions by way of insults to work donated for free.
> Pony up some substantial money and make it contingent on meeting guidelines.
You can't even do this, gimp doesn't take donations or money for development.
https://www.gimp.org/donating/
You can subscribe to one developer's patreon, or buy an animated movie by another pair of developers. That's it, no contingencies allowed. And direct donations to the foundation cannot be spent on development efforts.
> Donations through GNOME Foundation can only be used for community needs (conferences, developer meetings, material renewal…).
Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?
#214I'm surprised there's uncertainty about how Gimp should be redesigned. Just copy Photoshop! Select tools on the left, configure the current tool at the top, global options on the right. Affinity does this and nobody complains. Thanks to MacOS help search, we even already have the command search that this video proposes. And it has interaction hints too. Gimp isn't more complex than Photoshop. We don't need it to rein…
This still blows my mind a bit - yes literally they should just copy Photoshop because everyone knows how to use it. Menus are fine, any complex tool has lots of menus. I have been wishing for a photoshop-like GUI frontend for GIMP for 20 years. It's not even that far off. That sounds ungrateful, and it's not meant to be - I know this is just how it is, amazing stuff under the hood and janky interfaces
I mean, linux today is full of macos GUI ripoffs and people love it - because Apple did some great UI design. I was using windows 11 recently and so many common things are complex to the typical user - e.g. making an application run at startup, anyway I'm in boomer mode so I'd better stop writing
Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?
#215NO! WE SHOULD USE RE-DO WITH PIE-MENUS ONLY :P Universal Search? Like F3 in Blender? Sure! just do it... i studied for a year advertising and marketing degree at an university and i was at the best grades on photograph and any other class that required some creative stuff. all done in Gimp... i don't know how the late game is but certainly some company wanting the proprietary .blob of your work in Photoshop lang bina…
Agreed! ;)
I know you're joking about "ONLY", but actually, linear drop-down menus are just an edge case of pie menus with multiple items in only one direction: down. So you can also make drop-down, -up, -left, -right, and other direction menus with a decent pie menu editor, like the Blender pie menu editor add-on.
Pie menus are much more useful if users can edit and create their own, especially in feature-rich extensible configurable applications that different people use in different ways like Gimp and Blender.
Blender has great pie menu support, and there's a nice pie menu editor add-on, but it really needs a built-in WYSIWYG pie menu editor, supporting on-the-fly direct manipulation WYSIWYG drag-and-drop pie menu editing, like Simon Schneegans's brilliant Gnome-Pie and Fly-Pie.
By "direct manipulation WYSIWYG drag-and-drop" I mean that ideally you should be able to put any existing menu into edit mode on the fly, and edit the circular pie, linear, or hybrid layout directly by dragging items around to different slices, instead of with an indirect linear scrolling list or outline in a separate window.
You need to be able directly and immediately edit them as they will appear to the user, not as some abstract linear tree outline (or god forbid, raw xml).
Pie Menu Development for Blender:
https://devtalk.blender.org/t/pie-menu-development-for-blend...
Blender Pie Menu Editor:
https://blendermarket.com/products/pie-menu-editor
Gnome-Pie (wikipedia):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnome-Pie
Gnome-Pie (github):
https://schneegans.github.io/gnome-pie
Gnome-Pie 0.6.1:
Fly-Pie 7: GNOME Shell 40+ and a new WYSIWYG Menu Editor!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRT3O9-H5Xs
Fly-Pie 10: A new Clipboard Menu, proper touch support & much more!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGXtckqhEIk
And Simon's new project, Kando:
Kando - An Open Source, Cross-Platform Pie Menu:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTdfnUDMO9k
Follow and support the project on Ko-Fi:
Kando on GitHub:
https://github.com/kando-menu/kando
I also love the beautiful Trace and Coral menus he designed for his Bachelor thesis 11 years ago:
https://schneegans.github.io/news/2012/10/10/bachelor-thesis
The Trace-Menu:
The Coral-Menu:
More of his great stuff:
A retrospective of my 35 years of work with pie menus:
Pie Menus: A 30 Year Retrospective (2018):
https://donhopkins.medium.com/pie-menus-936fed383ff1
>Steve Jobs Thought Pie Menus Sucked: “That sucks! That sucks! Wow, that’s neat! That sucks!”
>On October 25, 1988, I gave Steve Jobs a demo of pie menus, NeWS, UniPress Emacs and HyperTIES at the Educom conference in Washington DC. His reaction was to jump up and down, point at the screen, and yell “That sucks! That sucks! Wow, that’s neat! That sucks!”
>I tried explaining how we’d performed an experiment proving pie menus were faster than linear menus, but he insisted the liner menus in NeXT Step were the best possible menus ever.
>But who was I to rain on his parade, two weeks after the first release of NeXT Step 0.8? (Up to that time, it was the most hyped piece of vaporware ever, and doubters were wearing t-shirts saying “NeVR Step”!) Even after he went back to Apple, Steve Jobs never took a bite of Apple Pie Menus, the forbidden fruit. There’s no accounting for taste!
The ideas behind pie menus have actually been around for even longer than that, since at least 1969:
Flight of the PIXIE - Yuja Wang:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDrqR9XssJI
>Dedication and Thanks to: Neil E. Wiseman, Heinz U. Lemke, John O. Hiles, PIXIE: A New Approach to Graphical Man-Machine Communication, Proceedings of 1969 CAD Conference Southampton IEEE Conference Publication 51, pp. 463–471. David Chapman, Cambridge University Library. Remixing and Synchronization with AfterEffects by Don Hopkins.
>This film demonstrates an early graphical user interface in use. It was made in 1969 to accompany a paper entitled “PIXIE: a new approach to graphical man-machine communication” presented at the 1969 CAD Conference held in Southampton.
https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/library/archives.html
PIXIE ran on a PDP-7 with a Type 340 CRT vector display with a light pen, networked with the Titan at Cambridge University, and was one of the earliest examples of a network distributed gui application, developed by Neil E. Wiseman, Heinz U. Lemke, and John O. Hiles.
https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/rainbow/people/neilw.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(1963_computer)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-7
David S H Rosenthal: Kids Today Have No Idea:
Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?
#216> [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.
Inkscape has a lot to work on as a "content creation" app, while in terms of being true to SVG, it's done a lot of things the way you'd expect.
And I think that's most of the disconnect in the UI, which the devs have gradually gotten over by adding shadow XML data in the SVG to support Inkscape features while always presenting a rendered result.
Still, the drawing tools aren't consistent about the units they use yet. There is a lot of stuff there, and some of it is just papercuts.
Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?
#217All 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.
Many CAD programs, opensource or proprietary, work almost this way. There is often a relatively lesser known CAD/geometry engine behind the front end everyone knows as the CAD program. Perhaps since engineering has more standard computations than art.
Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> e.g. if you type "pref" it won't find "Settings". I find the OSX search feature close to useless as a "help" feature because of this. I came to the realization that it's more like a power user shortcut tool than something to help new users. If you know exactly what you're looking for and exactly what the application calls it then you can skip navigating through nested menus.
Exactly. It requires a perfect match. No ambiguity. You need a more fuzzy search where you type in the concept and it gives you ideas of what to use. And if don’t even know the concept, well… ChatGPT?
Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
I have used both and don't find the difference so huge. Besides photopea doesn't have a quarter of the functionaliti as Gimp, is afaik not controlable from the cli in batch mode. The scope is completely different.
Re: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?
#220This is a terrible idea. The menu bar works great, integrates with shortcuts, and gives 100% discoverability. Anyone who wants to get rid of it is a bad developer and a bad person.
how is discoverability 100% if you - can't search - don't have 100% functionality
GIMP does have search, just hit / and you can find any action.
The problem with search and discoverability is that search requires input from me, whereas discoverability means that the program explicitly offers its features to me. With search, I would never discover some handy new feature I wouldn't think of myself, or something that is named differently than I expect.
Hunting through a menu, while not optimal, allows me to view a 'catalog' of all the features.