7 ms·

> the GIMP has a more elegant UI GIMP must have come a long way for those words to form a sentence! Not that it was ever necessarily inelegant, but GIMP's rep

by AimHere 10y ago

> the GIMP has a more elegant UI GIMP must have come a long way for those words to form a sentence! Not that it was ever necessarily inelegant, but GIMP's reputation has always suffered from a big chunk of it's natural audience being experienced Photoshop users who find the transition jarring, and trash the UI for that reason. Hearing someone praise the interface is a bit unusual, still!

mathw 10y ago
FWIW I find Photoshop more intimidating and confusing than GIMP, because I never learned to use Photoshop. If you're looking at GIMP as something to attract Photoshop users, sure, the UI is bad because it's not the same as Photoshop. Sure, there are places you can look at Photoshop and say "wow, that's so much better for productive use" (ignoring feature differences where we know Photoshop is ahead of course). But this thing about GIMP having a UI that's _objectively_ bad is just unsupportable IMO.
- Joeboy 10y ago
  > But this thing about GIMP having a UI that's _objectively_ bad is just unsupportable IMO. I don't mind GIMP's UI being different from Photoshop. I last used Photoshop over a decade ago and that would be plenty of time to adjust to any good UI. The things that annoy me about GIMP's UI are things like the focus always being in the wrong place so I have to use the mouse, or windows being placed over things I need to see, or having to reselect my font styling every time I retype something. The problem isn't that Photoshop does something different, it's that what GIMP does is bad. I happily use Blender's UI even though it's like nothing else on Earth. Edit: Just so I don't come off entirely as an ungrateful asshole, I use GIMP regularly and I appreciate the work that goes into it. I just get tired of people claiming there's nothing wrong with the UI, when there so clearly is. Single Window Mode was a huge step in the right direction IMO.
  - pawadu 10y ago
    Your comment made me wonder if there are any way to contribute to design in FOSS project the same way people contribute to the code? Does anyone know of any FOSS project that has a documented UI and UX contribution process?
    - Joeboy 10y ago
      There's this: http://gui.gimp.org/index.php/GIMP_UI_Redesign http://gui.gimp.org/index.php/GIMP_UI_Redesign
  - phaemon 10y ago
    > things like the focus always being in the wrong place so I have to use the mouse, or windows being placed over things I need to see But both of these are things that are fixed with Single Window Mode (which it's clear you know about). Complaining about a UI issue that has already been fixed does seem a bit ungrateful. > or having to reselect my font styling every time I retype something Ok, fair enough. That one is less obvious as there are two places to change the font. If you're in Single Window Mode, you'll see that when you select the Text tool, you'll get the Tool Options underneath. Change the font there and that becomes the new default. You can still choose different fonts in the floating selector for specific Text fields.
    - Joeboy 10y ago
      > But both of these are things that are fixed with Single Window Mode (which it's clear you know about). They aren't entirely gone though. Eg. if I find my chosen font in the font selector, click it or press enter to select it, and continue typing I'll end up with "Nimbus Sans Lsomerandomtext" in the font selection box. Another example - the default shortcut for "Show / hide docks" is Tab, which is also the shortcut to cycle between tools. So which of those things happens depends on what part of the screen happens to be focused. It's true that Single Window Mode made a lot of those sorts of problems go away, and possibly I'm holding on to the years of frustration at Gimp people saying there was no problem before it was finally introduced. I didn't know the two font boxes did different things, I always used the one in the floating selector. Thanks for clarifying the behaviour. The floating selector is generally a source of annoyance for me. I can move it up or down, but that'll also move my text. So if I want to see what's under it while typing, as far as I know I'm SOL. Maybe there's some way to turn it off or make it behave differently?
      - prokoudine 10y ago
        > Another example - the default shortcut for "Show / hide docks" is Tab, which is also the shortcut to cycle between tools. Not anymore. https://git.gnome.org/browse/gimp/commit/?id=52ad5bb2a11e39ffe714b5b3ba1f3be0aa305e7f https://git.gnome.org/browse/gimp/commit/?id=52ad5bb2a11e39f...
  - kitsunesoba 10y ago
    One thing that amazes me is that to this day, its Layers palette offers no way to select multiple layers. At least, not through any UI convention used by major operating systems in the past couple of decades… Under macOS it also has this funny little issue of picking up on the most recently added input method for setting the UI language instead of the system's default/current selected input method. As a result my copy of the GIMP runs in Japanese despite the rest of the system being NA English.
- joe_the_user 10y ago
  I use both GIMP and Inkscape regularly. I used GIMP every third day to just crop an image and sometimes to add text to an image. GIMP is a hodgepodge that has at best marginally improved over the years. I'd give the GIMP UI credit for being good-enough but that's about it. I can understand that for someone people, a UI that can be simply understood is the main thing (Photoshop, deriving from pre-computer methods, is opaque in its operations but the now-obscure Corel Photopaint showed how a paint program could have an actual good interface - naturally, similar to CorelDraw and ... Inkscape). Consider that there are wide variety of tasks that clearly take more time than necessary. The separation of the move, scale, rotate and so-forth operations into distinction tools is an constant annoyance (Inkscape has one tool for all this btw). If you input text over an image and then attempt to move this text, the background image move instead (you can do it with a little UI dancing but why, this should be simple). Setting the font and size of text is a constant pain also as mentioned by other posters.
whyileft 10y ago
Its because GIMP's UI is designed for users that have more traditional Linux style window managers(tiling, focus follows mouse etc.) Whereas most other programs, including the Adobe suite, are designed for the more underpowered window systems in osx and windows. That's why it is painful to use in those environments and environments like gnome which follow a similar design philosophy.
- DonHopkins 10y ago
  Comparing Gimp to X-Windows window managers is pretty apt, actually: "In summary, ICCCM is a technological disaster: a toxic waste dump of broken protocols, backward compatibility nightmares, complex nonsolutions to obsolete nonproblems, a twisted mass of scabs and scar tissue intended to cover up the moral and intellectual depravity of the industry's standard naked emperor. Using these toolkits is like trying to make a bookshelf out of mashed potatoes. - Jamie Zawinski" http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/disaster.html http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/disast...
- prokoudine 10y ago
  > Its because GIMP's UI is designed for users that have more traditional Linux style window managers(tiling, focus follows mouse etc.) I think I can safely speak for the team here: no, we don't think much about tiling or f-f-m.
  - whyileft 10y ago
    Well, then I guess its just a happy accident because the separate windows for different tools makes it a lot more convenient for with weirdos like me. So thanks a bunch, even if you didn't mean it!
DonHopkins 10y ago
It's as if some of the core GIMP developers and evangelists wear the fact that they have never ever used or know anything about Photoshop and never will as a badge of pride, and they are fanatically dedicated to never sullying themselves by ever even looking at Photoshop or especially listening to any of the complaints from Photoshop users. Any changes to GIMP that make it more like Photoshop, or acknowledgement that there's anything about Photoshop that GIMP should emulate, are considered anathema. It's always been a hot-button issue, so you get rationalizations like "The GIMP has lost its User eXperience (UX) maintainer. Jack Wallen thinks this could be good news for one of the most powerful open-source image editing tools," [1], and articles with touchy defensive titles [2] like "GIMP is Not a Photoshop Alternative", sections like "Why It’s Unfair to Compare GIMP to Photoshop", and quotes like "For example, when I’m talking about my Linux OS to a non-Linux user, and if he or she asks about Photoshop, my response is along the lines of “Nope, no Photoshop; I just use GIMP.". It's like: "No puppet! No puppet! You're the puppet!" And then there's the stubborn refusal to ever consider changing the name so it's not so offensive. That would be far too "politically correct". [1] http://www.techrepublic.com/article/the-gimps-bad-news-could-be-good-news/ http://www.techrepublic.com/article/the-gimps-bad-news-could... [2] http://designinstruct.com/opinion/photoshop-alternative-gimp/ http://designinstruct.com/opinion/photoshop-alternative-gimp...
- JoeAltmaier 10y ago
  Its certainly OK for a product to innovate, as GIMP has. But sometimes the differences are gratuitous. That doesn't help with GIMP adoption, because admit it, most folks have some exposure to Photoshop already. Further, GIMP suffers (as many mature products do) from a certain baroque-ness of feature. Its menus and features have grown from someplace less mature, to where they are. And it shows in the clumsy menus that make sense if you went along for the ride but for a 1st-timer are just confusing.
  - Joeboy 10y ago
    > Its certainly OK for a product to innovate, as GIMP has. I'm not sure the GIMP's UI choices can generally be described as "innovating". I think they're generally just the obvious GTK+ default options, implemented without much testing or tweaking.
RUG3Y 10y ago
A lot of people that hate on Gimp are really saying, "It's not Photoshop and I like Photoshop."

by AimHere 10y ago

mathw 10y ago

FWIW I find Photoshop more intimidating and confusing than GIMP, because I never learned to use Photoshop. If you're looking at GIMP as something to attract Photoshop users, sure, the UI is bad because it's not the same as Photoshop. Sure, there are places you can look at Photoshop and say "wow, that's so much better for productive use" (ignoring feature differences where we know Photoshop is ahead of course). But this thing about GIMP having a UI that's _objectively_ bad is just unsupportable IMO.

Joeboy 10y ago
> But this thing about GIMP having a UI that's _objectively_ bad is just unsupportable IMO. I don't mind GIMP's UI being different from Photoshop. I last used Photoshop over a decade ago and that would be plenty of time to adjust to any good UI. The things that annoy me about GIMP's UI are things like the focus always being in the wrong place so I have to use the mouse, or windows being placed over things I need to see, or having to reselect my font styling every time I retype something. The problem isn't that Photoshop does something different, it's that what GIMP does is bad. I happily use Blender's UI even though it's like nothing else on Earth. Edit: Just so I don't come off entirely as an ungrateful asshole, I use GIMP regularly and I appreciate the work that goes into it. I just get tired of people claiming there's nothing wrong with the UI, when there so clearly is. Single Window Mode was a huge step in the right direction IMO.
- pawadu 10y ago
  Your comment made me wonder if there are any way to contribute to design in FOSS project the same way people contribute to the code? Does anyone know of any FOSS project that has a documented UI and UX contribution process?
  - Joeboy 10y ago
    There's this: http://gui.gimp.org/index.php/GIMP_UI_Redesign http://gui.gimp.org/index.php/GIMP_UI_Redesign
- phaemon 10y ago
  > things like the focus always being in the wrong place so I have to use the mouse, or windows being placed over things I need to see But both of these are things that are fixed with Single Window Mode (which it's clear you know about). Complaining about a UI issue that has already been fixed does seem a bit ungrateful. > or having to reselect my font styling every time I retype something Ok, fair enough. That one is less obvious as there are two places to change the font. If you're in Single Window Mode, you'll see that when you select the Text tool, you'll get the Tool Options underneath. Change the font there and that becomes the new default. You can still choose different fonts in the floating selector for specific Text fields.
  - Joeboy 10y ago
    > But both of these are things that are fixed with Single Window Mode (which it's clear you know about). They aren't entirely gone though. Eg. if I find my chosen font in the font selector, click it or press enter to select it, and continue typing I'll end up with "Nimbus Sans Lsomerandomtext" in the font selection box. Another example - the default shortcut for "Show / hide docks" is Tab, which is also the shortcut to cycle between tools. So which of those things happens depends on what part of the screen happens to be focused. It's true that Single Window Mode made a lot of those sorts of problems go away, and possibly I'm holding on to the years of frustration at Gimp people saying there was no problem before it was finally introduced. I didn't know the two font boxes did different things, I always used the one in the floating selector. Thanks for clarifying the behaviour. The floating selector is generally a source of annoyance for me. I can move it up or down, but that'll also move my text. So if I want to see what's under it while typing, as far as I know I'm SOL. Maybe there's some way to turn it off or make it behave differently?
    - prokoudine 10y ago
      > Another example - the default shortcut for "Show / hide docks" is Tab, which is also the shortcut to cycle between tools. Not anymore. https://git.gnome.org/browse/gimp/commit/?id=52ad5bb2a11e39ffe714b5b3ba1f3be0aa305e7f https://git.gnome.org/browse/gimp/commit/?id=52ad5bb2a11e39f...
- kitsunesoba 10y ago
  One thing that amazes me is that to this day, its Layers palette offers no way to select multiple layers. At least, not through any UI convention used by major operating systems in the past couple of decades… Under macOS it also has this funny little issue of picking up on the most recently added input method for setting the UI language instead of the system's default/current selected input method. As a result my copy of the GIMP runs in Japanese despite the rest of the system being NA English.
joe_the_user 10y ago
I use both GIMP and Inkscape regularly. I used GIMP every third day to just crop an image and sometimes to add text to an image. GIMP is a hodgepodge that has at best marginally improved over the years. I'd give the GIMP UI credit for being good-enough but that's about it. I can understand that for someone people, a UI that can be simply understood is the main thing (Photoshop, deriving from pre-computer methods, is opaque in its operations but the now-obscure Corel Photopaint showed how a paint program could have an actual good interface - naturally, similar to CorelDraw and ... Inkscape). Consider that there are wide variety of tasks that clearly take more time than necessary. The separation of the move, scale, rotate and so-forth operations into distinction tools is an constant annoyance (Inkscape has one tool for all this btw). If you input text over an image and then attempt to move this text, the background image move instead (you can do it with a little UI dancing but why, this should be simple). Setting the font and size of text is a constant pain also as mentioned by other posters.

whyileft 10y ago

Its because GIMP's UI is designed for users that have more traditional Linux style window managers(tiling, focus follows mouse etc.) Whereas most other programs, including the Adobe suite, are designed for the more underpowered window systems in osx and windows. That's why it is painful to use in those environments and environments like gnome which follow a similar design philosophy.

DonHopkins 10y ago
Comparing Gimp to X-Windows window managers is pretty apt, actually: "In summary, ICCCM is a technological disaster: a toxic waste dump of broken protocols, backward compatibility nightmares, complex nonsolutions to obsolete nonproblems, a twisted mass of scabs and scar tissue intended to cover up the moral and intellectual depravity of the industry's standard naked emperor. Using these toolkits is like trying to make a bookshelf out of mashed potatoes. - Jamie Zawinski" http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/disaster.html http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/disast...
prokoudine 10y ago
> Its because GIMP's UI is designed for users that have more traditional Linux style window managers(tiling, focus follows mouse etc.) I think I can safely speak for the team here: no, we don't think much about tiling or f-f-m.
- whyileft 10y ago
  Well, then I guess its just a happy accident because the separate windows for different tools makes it a lot more convenient for with weirdos like me. So thanks a bunch, even if you didn't mean it!

DonHopkins 10y ago

It's as if some of the core GIMP developers and evangelists wear the fact that they have never ever used or know anything about Photoshop and never will as a badge of pride, and they are fanatically dedicated to never sullying themselves by ever even looking at Photoshop or especially listening to any of the complaints from Photoshop users. Any changes to GIMP that make it more like Photoshop, or acknowledgement that there's anything about Photoshop that GIMP should emulate, are considered anathema. It's always been a hot-button issue, so you get rationalizations like "The GIMP has lost its User eXperience (UX) maintainer. Jack Wallen thinks this could be good news for one of the most powerful open-source image editing tools," [1], and articles with touchy defensive titles [2] like "GIMP is Not a Photoshop Alternative", sections like "Why It’s Unfair to Compare GIMP to Photoshop", and quotes like "For example, when I’m talking about my Linux OS to a non-Linux user, and if he or she asks about Photoshop, my response is along the lines of “Nope, no Photoshop; I just use GIMP.". It's like: "No puppet! No puppet! You're the puppet!" And then there's the stubborn refusal to ever consider changing the name so it's not so offensive. That would be far too "politically correct". [1] http://www.techrepublic.com/article/the-gimps-bad-news-could-be-good-news/ http://www.techrepublic.com/article/the-gimps-bad-news-could... [2] http://designinstruct.com/opinion/photoshop-alternative-gimp/ http://designinstruct.com/opinion/photoshop-alternative-gimp...

JoeAltmaier 10y ago
Its certainly OK for a product to innovate, as GIMP has. But sometimes the differences are gratuitous. That doesn't help with GIMP adoption, because admit it, most folks have some exposure to Photoshop already. Further, GIMP suffers (as many mature products do) from a certain baroque-ness of feature. Its menus and features have grown from someplace less mature, to where they are. And it shows in the clumsy menus that make sense if you went along for the ride but for a 1st-timer are just confusing.
- Joeboy 10y ago
  > Its certainly OK for a product to innovate, as GIMP has. I'm not sure the GIMP's UI choices can generally be described as "innovating". I think they're generally just the obvious GTK+ default options, implemented without much testing or tweaking.

RUG3Y 10y ago

A lot of people that hate on Gimp are really saying, "It's not Photoshop and I like Photoshop."