47 ms·

Inkscape Moves to GitLab

525 points by dabber 9y ago

na85 9y ago
I really want to learn to use inkscape well, but just can't grok the interface. It's a sad symptom shared by many open-source projects. They seem to want to differentiate themselves as (e.g. "not photoshop" in gimp's case) but seem to equate that with "ignoring good ui/ux design".
- jitl 9y ago
  When I last used both regularly (2009), Inkscape's editing tools were pretty far ahead of Adobe Illustrator. I found it much easier to work with Bézier curves, automatic tracing, complex stroke and fill styles, and especially gradients. It does take a few days for things to sink into your noggin after so long in a different tool, but I certainly think Inkscape's quality is very high. It's worth learning, unlike (imo) GIMP.
- catdog 9y ago
  I think that it's more that they ignore the UX you are used to from other tools, not necessarily bad, just different.
- nom 9y ago
  Maybe you are used to certain UIs and behaviors? OSS doesn't want to 'be different', it just doesn't adhere to industry practices and doesn't try to imitate the competition, especially in niches like video/photo/audio editing, which is IMHO a good thing. I don't think the Inkscape UI is really that hard to understand, it's just different. Granted, I haven't used Photoshop and Illustrator since version 6.0, but I had no trouble getting into Gimp or Inkscape within a couple of days of using it. I didn't find it hard to grok the UI and the intended behavior, it became pretty usable very quickly (bugs aside...). As a developer, I can easily understand what the intended behavior in these programs is, everything is very logical.... but maybe that's the problem many users have ;) Edit: and I can see how the bugs can confuse users to no end. It might be even the greatest disadvantage, especially inkscape behaved really buggy the last time I used it half a year ago :(
- bhouston 9y ago
  I use inkscape and it seems fine and logical.
  - nom 9y ago
    I'm thinking right now: maybe it's too logical. It's easy to understand the behavior and UI from a programmer/developer's perspective, but the main portion of the target group in this sector does think completely different.
    - a3n 9y ago
      My demographic: I use Inkscape about once a year, to make a single small thing that I know would probably be best as a vector graphic, for sizing options. For a thing that should probably take about an hour, it takes me half a day, to relearn the handful of things I need to do. Which, I think, is pretty good, considering I'm not at all a graphics person, and usually have to search around just to discover the terms I need to search for how to do what I want. My results are amateurish, but good enough, and probably wouldn't exist without Inkscape. I like it.
    - cat199 9y ago
      yes, making things illogical always helps to improve a product.
- awinter-py 9y ago
  I use it -- I agree that it's clunky, and there's probably a YMMV factor depending on your window manager. Once you learn where everything is you can get a surprising amount done with it. Adobe Illustrator is, for a novice, surprisingly not that much better.
- Hedja 9y ago
  I wouldn't say it's bad. It's confusing at first, like most interfaces with a ton of controls, but you gradually get used to it and know where things are. The bad thing about the UI at the moment for me is the lack of HiDPI support (as far as I can tell). And back when I was using OSX, the interface seemed a bit janky since it used XQuartz and it generally wasn't very native both in terms of UI rendering and its default keyboard shortcuts.
  - mkl 9y ago
    There is support for HiDPI, to an extent (see e.g. [1]). What there doesn't seem to be support for is having both a HiDPI and low DPI screen. [1] http://www.inkscapeforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=18684 http://www.inkscapeforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=18684
    - ibotty 9y ago
      This is coming in the next GTK Version.
- thegeomaster 9y ago
  This is what I used to think, but reflecting on my usage of these tools lately has shaken my belief. Here's my theory, illustrated on a personal example: I've been using Photoshop for a long time, and I've learned a lot of its shortcuts and intricacies. Basically, when I want to accomplish something in Photoshop, I already have an idea on how I'll go about it, using the functionality that's available. But GIMP, on the other hand, never really clicked for me. I find it very unintuitive and limiting, and it's a huge pain to have to do something in GIMP when Photoshop's not readily available. I've convinced myself that this is because GIMP has a much inferior UX and is orders of magnitude more limiting than PS (at least the subset of their features I use in my day-to-day usage). On the other hand, since my light vector editing needs have been satisfied by Photoshop for a long time, I haven't really learned Illustrator. Recently, for various reasons, I've had to do some heavier-than-usual vector editing stuff, but still nothing requiring more than simple Beziers, fills and strokes, so I've been doing it in Inkscape since it's just been handy. After some time, I decided to try and use Illustrator, figuring it'd be like a whole new world. And then, surprisingly, I realized I don't really like it. The interface was illogical and not in line with my mental model at all. I struggled to complete basic tasks, and finally gave up and did the job in Inkscape. Basically, it was very reminiscent of the Photoshop―GIMP situation. So my conclusion is that the tools and their UX are very powerful in giving me a mental model of a task, and significantly more so than I would have imagined. So it might not be 100% true to say that the UX in these tools is inferior. It's just so different from what we're used to that we have a very, very hard time separating the "different" from "worse" in our heads.
  - joshvm 9y ago
    GIMP also has some weird omissions. You can't lock a layer so that it won't move, for instance. This is apparently coming in the unstable branch, but it boggles my mind that this wasn't a feature from day one. There is also 'anchor' but that doesn't seem to mean what anchor means in just about any other CAD/Graphics application. The expected behaviour in Photoshop is that if you drag-move, you only move the selected layer. It seems like in GIMP if you drag-move, you drag the highest layer that has a painted pixel under your cursor. There are probably situations where this saves time, but more often I try and drag some text around and I end up moving a background layer by mistake. I often find myself using Inkscape to save time, it's intuitive enough and it works well.
- LyndsySimon 9y ago
  I have the opposite issue - I've been using Inkscape for years for vector editing, and have a really hard time trying to get used to Illustrator's. Inkscape's keyboard command in particular are much more practical than Illustrator's for my workflow.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- starky 9y ago
  I agree, the list of well designed and usable OSS software is very short IMO. I suspect that most OSS software doesn't have a skilled UI/UX designer so they make due with what they have. Not to mention that GTK+ and Qt do not look very nice in general. Inkscape's interface isn't too bad, not good, but I rarely have significant issues with it. GIMP is an absolute nightmare of UI/UX design, I can't understand how someone hasn't fixed that by now.
  - joshvm 9y ago
    Qt, by default, mimics the look and feel of the host OS. On Windows and Mac, Qt uses native GUI elements so it's a little unfair to say it doesn't look nice. A well laid out Qt program should be indistinguishable from a native application. I'm sure people have very strong opinions on whether native UIs are nice or not! The issue, as you point out, is lack of designer. Both Qt and GTK can be extensively customised, but you need to know what you're doing (in an artistic sense).
  - prokoudine 9y ago
    > GIMP is an absolute nightmare of UI/UX design, I can't understand how someone hasn't fixed that by now. Of course you can understand that. Try writing actual code to fix any pet peeve with GIMP's UI/UX (or any app's UI/UX). Then we'll sit down and talk again about the role of volunteers in a free software project :)
- thristian 9y ago
  Reading between the lines, I suspect you're trying to say that Inkscape is gratuitously different from Adobe Illustrator? Well, it's interface is also suspiciously similar to (older versions of) Corel DRAW, so maybe it's not so much deliberate differentiation as it is just borrowing from a different tradition than you're used to.
- rectang 9y ago
  Open source UIs are by and large designed by committee. Even when the governance of the project is by "benevolent dictator", it is hard to turn away contributions from the wider community. Even if a UI starts out simple and elegant, it will eventually die a death by a thousand cuts.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- Sharlin 9y ago
  Usually I'm the first to lament the sad state of UX in many (most?) OS programs but I've always found Inkscape to be very reasonable in that regard. However, I don't have experience with eg. Illustrator so there was no unlearning of muscle memory required.
- kyriakos 9y ago
  I never liked illustrator but inkscape is straight forward to me. But I am a long time user of Corel Draw which is quite similar so inkscape feels like home, so I guess your background matters. It's simple things like point selection that make all the difference. Inkscape is open source with good ui while gimp feels like they are trying to add as many tools as possible under the same application with no regard of user experience.
- prokoudine 9y ago
  > They seem to want to differentiate themselves as (e.g. "not photoshop" in gimp's case) but seem to equate that with "ignoring good ui/ux design". Nope, we bloody well know GIMP's UI sucks in many ways. But UI doesn't fix itself as you might suspect. For every few thousands of people who complain about its UI we maybe get just one occasional contributor.
benwilber0 9y ago
> During the decision about which platform would host our git repositories, we discounted staying on Launchpad itself as its git support was very weak compared to other platforms and the project doesn't appear to be actively developed. How in the heck did Canonical squander such an incredible opportunity to be the de facto standard for Ubuntu/FOSS code hosting by letting Launchpad stale so badly? They freaking built it into their distribution of apt with PPA shortcuts, etc. Unbelievable.
- thesmallestcat 9y ago
  Are you implying bzr isn't the next big thing??
  - weberc2 9y ago
    To be fair git is junk; it's just the standard so everyone has mostly learned it and it gets the job done, but at least Mercurial is better. Probably bzr too. I have probably 5 more years experience with it than Mercurial and I'm still googling for the correct incantation for things that are just infrequent enough for me to commit them to memory. With Mercurial, the command is what you would expect 90% of the time.
    - yock 9y ago
      Considering how many people are incredibly productive with Git, calling it junk might be unfair.
      - krupan 9y ago
        How many people are incredibly productive with git? Or most just kinda productive, as long as an expert isn't too far away from them?
        jdc0589 9y ago
        git is not complicated 95% of the time. you really only need to learn a handful of commands and read a blog post or two about branching models and you are good to go. is there is some set of problems plaguing git users I've just never run in to?
mintplant 9y ago
I can't find a link to their GitLab instance/repositories. Where is it?
- TranquilMarmot 9y ago
  https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape
  - winteriscoming 9y ago
    I couldn't find it either. Neither on their project pages nor that specific blog article and not even the "Search" option (where I searched for inkscape) on the gitlab.com/ site. Thanks TranquilMarmot for posting the link to the repo.
- legulere 9y ago
  Even more ridiculously the page name "Inkscape's Reposorities" (https://inkscape.org/en/develop/inkscape-git/ https://inkscape.org/en/develop/inkscape-git/) does not contain a link to their reposority.
lucideer 9y ago
I used to use Inkscape constantly on Windows & Linux, and really like it. I found the UI intuitive and it did absolutely everything I asked of it. Which is why the XQuartz/&c. user experience on macOS really really surprised me. It's absolutely unusable. Inkscape for macOS basically may was well not exist as far as my experience with it goes. Are there other comparable GTK+ apps that work well under macOS or is this a common story?
- m_mueller 9y ago
  It works okay-ish for me, although I pretty much never use copy&paste in XQuartz on mac. But I still can't name a better free vector graphics program on mac.
  - contingencies 9y ago
    Me too. Not a great issue, though the XQuartz background thing kinda screws up Command+tab, it's still perfectly usable, if a little rough around the edges.
- clumsysmurf 9y ago
  I wonder ... if they should do what Wireshark did, and abandon GTK for Qt.
  - scrollaway 9y ago
    Probably, and I've heard from some Inkscape devs that they'd like to. But it's a pretty massive project, which would directly result in the current developers being less proficient at the UI toolkit they use. Qt is an easy sell on fresh projects, but switching a large existing codebase is huge.
    - kraig911 9y ago
      At this point moving to Qt for something as large as Inkscape would be too massive I imagine. Just +1'ing your point. Inkscape's UI uses so much common elements out of GTK too that it would really hose some of the developed creature comforts the community has got used to. It'd be a huge project with not a lot of ROI to go and redo all the chrome.
rishidevkota 9y ago
:)
riffic 9y ago
Self-hosted GitLab, or gitlab.com? Would a link in the article to the repo be too hard?
- shakna 9y ago
  https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape
codebam 9y ago
I really hope other FOSS projects take the same initiative
luord 9y ago
Every time a project moves to GitLab or GitHub it is great news; I find them much easier to contribute to. It's specially goo news when it's gitlab, it's just an all-around awesome service.
- rvern 9y ago
  It's really bad news when it's GitHub, as far as I'm concerned (Python...). Self-hosted GitLab or Phabricator is great news (GNOME,[1] Wikimedia[2]). [1]: https://wiki.gnome.org/Initiatives/DevelopmentInfrastructure/ https://wiki.gnome.org/Initiatives/DevelopmentInfrastructure... [2]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Phabricator https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Phabrica...
  - technics256 9y ago
    Care to elaborate on the GitHub python issues for someone not totally in the loop? Thanks!
    - zanny 9y ago
      It isn't so much UX now, it is that you are bonding a lot of locked-in parts of your ecosystem to a proprietary platform. The issues, wiki, CI, and user-ecosystem of github aren't portable. If Github shut down, changed their policies, or just simply did something you don't like, you have no recourse if you bond your software to their platform. If you use gitlab, phabricator, gogs, or any other open source solution, either you are hosting it yourself - everyone wins - or you are using a centralized host equivalent to github, except now if they pull the rug out from under you you still have all the open source releases up to that point that you can pivot to - and you wouldn't necessarily need to self host, because someone will pick up the reins.
      - eddieroger 9y ago
        I agree that Issues are pretty locked, but otherwise it's fine, and you don't have to use GitHub Issues to track work if you don't want to. CI is mostly drive around hooks, and those should be portable. The wiki is just a collection of Markdown documents, so you could pull those off and put them anywhere else you want. Ecosystems are tied by default, so not much you can do there I suppose. I agree with the sentiment, but i think the risk is worth it for a lot of people, and I say that hosting my own private GitLab server.
rejschaap 9y ago
I am very curious how many devs will stop and how many will start contributing because of this move.
akerro 9y ago
Now just please make use of https://hosted.weblate.org/ https://hosted.weblate.org/ for translations
bburger71 9y ago
To be fair, I think you're just bad at using computers. They make these things called aliases, which let you make up helpful mnemonics if you struggle to remember the commands. Also, 5 years of experience, but you have to google commands? The manpage is right there, why does google and the internet ever have to get involved? If after 5 years of "using" a tool as powerful as git, and you have to google basic git commands, I'm not sure if you ever really spent any time learning how to use git at all or ever read the manpage. It's something that is common today in our form-over-function tech, but something I dearly miss. Read the manpage, maybe you'll discover git is not "junk".
- dang 9y ago
  We've banned this account for trolling. Would you please not create accounts to break the site guidelines here? We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14534872 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14534872 and marked it off-topic.

525 points by dabber 9y ago

na85 9y ago

I really want to learn to use inkscape well, but just can't grok the interface. It's a sad symptom shared by many open-source projects. They seem to want to differentiate themselves as (e.g. "not photoshop" in gimp's case) but seem to equate that with "ignoring good ui/ux design".

jitl 9y ago
When I last used both regularly (2009), Inkscape's editing tools were pretty far ahead of Adobe Illustrator. I found it much easier to work with Bézier curves, automatic tracing, complex stroke and fill styles, and especially gradients. It does take a few days for things to sink into your noggin after so long in a different tool, but I certainly think Inkscape's quality is very high. It's worth learning, unlike (imo) GIMP.
catdog 9y ago
I think that it's more that they ignore the UX you are used to from other tools, not necessarily bad, just different.
nom 9y ago
Maybe you are used to certain UIs and behaviors? OSS doesn't want to 'be different', it just doesn't adhere to industry practices and doesn't try to imitate the competition, especially in niches like video/photo/audio editing, which is IMHO a good thing. I don't think the Inkscape UI is really that hard to understand, it's just different. Granted, I haven't used Photoshop and Illustrator since version 6.0, but I had no trouble getting into Gimp or Inkscape within a couple of days of using it. I didn't find it hard to grok the UI and the intended behavior, it became pretty usable very quickly (bugs aside...). As a developer, I can easily understand what the intended behavior in these programs is, everything is very logical.... but maybe that's the problem many users have ;) Edit: and I can see how the bugs can confuse users to no end. It might be even the greatest disadvantage, especially inkscape behaved really buggy the last time I used it half a year ago :(
bhouston 9y ago
I use inkscape and it seems fine and logical.
- nom 9y ago
  I'm thinking right now: maybe it's too logical. It's easy to understand the behavior and UI from a programmer/developer's perspective, but the main portion of the target group in this sector does think completely different.
  - a3n 9y ago
    My demographic: I use Inkscape about once a year, to make a single small thing that I know would probably be best as a vector graphic, for sizing options. For a thing that should probably take about an hour, it takes me half a day, to relearn the handful of things I need to do. Which, I think, is pretty good, considering I'm not at all a graphics person, and usually have to search around just to discover the terms I need to search for how to do what I want. My results are amateurish, but good enough, and probably wouldn't exist without Inkscape. I like it.
  - cat199 9y ago
    yes, making things illogical always helps to improve a product.
awinter-py 9y ago
I use it -- I agree that it's clunky, and there's probably a YMMV factor depending on your window manager. Once you learn where everything is you can get a surprising amount done with it. Adobe Illustrator is, for a novice, surprisingly not that much better.
Hedja 9y ago
I wouldn't say it's bad. It's confusing at first, like most interfaces with a ton of controls, but you gradually get used to it and know where things are. The bad thing about the UI at the moment for me is the lack of HiDPI support (as far as I can tell). And back when I was using OSX, the interface seemed a bit janky since it used XQuartz and it generally wasn't very native both in terms of UI rendering and its default keyboard shortcuts.
- mkl 9y ago
  There is support for HiDPI, to an extent (see e.g. [1]). What there doesn't seem to be support for is having both a HiDPI and low DPI screen. [1] http://www.inkscapeforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=18684 http://www.inkscapeforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=18684
  - ibotty 9y ago
    This is coming in the next GTK Version.
thegeomaster 9y ago
This is what I used to think, but reflecting on my usage of these tools lately has shaken my belief. Here's my theory, illustrated on a personal example: I've been using Photoshop for a long time, and I've learned a lot of its shortcuts and intricacies. Basically, when I want to accomplish something in Photoshop, I already have an idea on how I'll go about it, using the functionality that's available. But GIMP, on the other hand, never really clicked for me. I find it very unintuitive and limiting, and it's a huge pain to have to do something in GIMP when Photoshop's not readily available. I've convinced myself that this is because GIMP has a much inferior UX and is orders of magnitude more limiting than PS (at least the subset of their features I use in my day-to-day usage). On the other hand, since my light vector editing needs have been satisfied by Photoshop for a long time, I haven't really learned Illustrator. Recently, for various reasons, I've had to do some heavier-than-usual vector editing stuff, but still nothing requiring more than simple Beziers, fills and strokes, so I've been doing it in Inkscape since it's just been handy. After some time, I decided to try and use Illustrator, figuring it'd be like a whole new world. And then, surprisingly, I realized I don't really like it. The interface was illogical and not in line with my mental model at all. I struggled to complete basic tasks, and finally gave up and did the job in Inkscape. Basically, it was very reminiscent of the Photoshop―GIMP situation. So my conclusion is that the tools and their UX are very powerful in giving me a mental model of a task, and significantly more so than I would have imagined. So it might not be 100% true to say that the UX in these tools is inferior. It's just so different from what we're used to that we have a very, very hard time separating the "different" from "worse" in our heads.
- joshvm 9y ago
  GIMP also has some weird omissions. You can't lock a layer so that it won't move, for instance. This is apparently coming in the unstable branch, but it boggles my mind that this wasn't a feature from day one. There is also 'anchor' but that doesn't seem to mean what anchor means in just about any other CAD/Graphics application. The expected behaviour in Photoshop is that if you drag-move, you only move the selected layer. It seems like in GIMP if you drag-move, you drag the highest layer that has a painted pixel under your cursor. There are probably situations where this saves time, but more often I try and drag some text around and I end up moving a background layer by mistake. I often find myself using Inkscape to save time, it's intuitive enough and it works well.
LyndsySimon 9y ago
I have the opposite issue - I've been using Inkscape for years for vector editing, and have a really hard time trying to get used to Illustrator's. Inkscape's keyboard command in particular are much more practical than Illustrator's for my workflow.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
starky 9y ago
I agree, the list of well designed and usable OSS software is very short IMO. I suspect that most OSS software doesn't have a skilled UI/UX designer so they make due with what they have. Not to mention that GTK+ and Qt do not look very nice in general. Inkscape's interface isn't too bad, not good, but I rarely have significant issues with it. GIMP is an absolute nightmare of UI/UX design, I can't understand how someone hasn't fixed that by now.
- joshvm 9y ago
  Qt, by default, mimics the look and feel of the host OS. On Windows and Mac, Qt uses native GUI elements so it's a little unfair to say it doesn't look nice. A well laid out Qt program should be indistinguishable from a native application. I'm sure people have very strong opinions on whether native UIs are nice or not! The issue, as you point out, is lack of designer. Both Qt and GTK can be extensively customised, but you need to know what you're doing (in an artistic sense).
- prokoudine 9y ago
  > GIMP is an absolute nightmare of UI/UX design, I can't understand how someone hasn't fixed that by now. Of course you can understand that. Try writing actual code to fix any pet peeve with GIMP's UI/UX (or any app's UI/UX). Then we'll sit down and talk again about the role of volunteers in a free software project :)
thristian 9y ago
Reading between the lines, I suspect you're trying to say that Inkscape is gratuitously different from Adobe Illustrator? Well, it's interface is also suspiciously similar to (older versions of) Corel DRAW, so maybe it's not so much deliberate differentiation as it is just borrowing from a different tradition than you're used to.
rectang 9y ago
Open source UIs are by and large designed by committee. Even when the governance of the project is by "benevolent dictator", it is hard to turn away contributions from the wider community. Even if a UI starts out simple and elegant, it will eventually die a death by a thousand cuts.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
Sharlin 9y ago
Usually I'm the first to lament the sad state of UX in many (most?) OS programs but I've always found Inkscape to be very reasonable in that regard. However, I don't have experience with eg. Illustrator so there was no unlearning of muscle memory required.
kyriakos 9y ago
I never liked illustrator but inkscape is straight forward to me. But I am a long time user of Corel Draw which is quite similar so inkscape feels like home, so I guess your background matters. It's simple things like point selection that make all the difference. Inkscape is open source with good ui while gimp feels like they are trying to add as many tools as possible under the same application with no regard of user experience.
prokoudine 9y ago
> They seem to want to differentiate themselves as (e.g. "not photoshop" in gimp's case) but seem to equate that with "ignoring good ui/ux design". Nope, we bloody well know GIMP's UI sucks in many ways. But UI doesn't fix itself as you might suspect. For every few thousands of people who complain about its UI we maybe get just one occasional contributor.

benwilber0 9y ago

> During the decision about which platform would host our git repositories, we discounted staying on Launchpad itself as its git support was very weak compared to other platforms and the project doesn't appear to be actively developed. How in the heck did Canonical squander such an incredible opportunity to be the de facto standard for Ubuntu/FOSS code hosting by letting Launchpad stale so badly? They freaking built it into their distribution of apt with PPA shortcuts, etc. Unbelievable.

thesmallestcat 9y ago
Are you implying bzr isn't the next big thing??
- weberc2 9y ago
  To be fair git is junk; it's just the standard so everyone has mostly learned it and it gets the job done, but at least Mercurial is better. Probably bzr too. I have probably 5 more years experience with it than Mercurial and I'm still googling for the correct incantation for things that are just infrequent enough for me to commit them to memory. With Mercurial, the command is what you would expect 90% of the time.
  - yock 9y ago
    Considering how many people are incredibly productive with Git, calling it junk might be unfair.
    - krupan 9y ago
      How many people are incredibly productive with git? Or most just kinda productive, as long as an expert isn't too far away from them?
      - jdc0589 9y ago
        git is not complicated 95% of the time. you really only need to learn a handful of commands and read a blog post or two about branching models and you are good to go. is there is some set of problems plaguing git users I've just never run in to?

mintplant 9y ago

I can't find a link to their GitLab instance/repositories. Where is it?

TranquilMarmot 9y ago
https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape
- winteriscoming 9y ago
  I couldn't find it either. Neither on their project pages nor that specific blog article and not even the "Search" option (where I searched for inkscape) on the gitlab.com/ site. Thanks TranquilMarmot for posting the link to the repo.
legulere 9y ago
Even more ridiculously the page name "Inkscape's Reposorities" (https://inkscape.org/en/develop/inkscape-git/ https://inkscape.org/en/develop/inkscape-git/) does not contain a link to their reposority.

lucideer 9y ago

I used to use Inkscape constantly on Windows & Linux, and really like it. I found the UI intuitive and it did absolutely everything I asked of it. Which is why the XQuartz/&c. user experience on macOS really really surprised me. It's absolutely unusable. Inkscape for macOS basically may was well not exist as far as my experience with it goes. Are there other comparable GTK+ apps that work well under macOS or is this a common story?

m_mueller 9y ago
It works okay-ish for me, although I pretty much never use copy&paste in XQuartz on mac. But I still can't name a better free vector graphics program on mac.
- contingencies 9y ago
  Me too. Not a great issue, though the XQuartz background thing kinda screws up Command+tab, it's still perfectly usable, if a little rough around the edges.
clumsysmurf 9y ago
I wonder ... if they should do what Wireshark did, and abandon GTK for Qt.
- scrollaway 9y ago
  Probably, and I've heard from some Inkscape devs that they'd like to. But it's a pretty massive project, which would directly result in the current developers being less proficient at the UI toolkit they use. Qt is an easy sell on fresh projects, but switching a large existing codebase is huge.
  - kraig911 9y ago
    At this point moving to Qt for something as large as Inkscape would be too massive I imagine. Just +1'ing your point. Inkscape's UI uses so much common elements out of GTK too that it would really hose some of the developed creature comforts the community has got used to. It'd be a huge project with not a lot of ROI to go and redo all the chrome.

rishidevkota 9y ago

riffic 9y ago

Self-hosted GitLab, or gitlab.com? Would a link in the article to the repo be too hard?

shakna 9y ago
https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape

codebam 9y ago

I really hope other FOSS projects take the same initiative

luord 9y ago

Every time a project moves to GitLab or GitHub it is great news; I find them much easier to contribute to. It's specially goo news when it's gitlab, it's just an all-around awesome service.

rvern 9y ago
It's really bad news when it's GitHub, as far as I'm concerned (Python...). Self-hosted GitLab or Phabricator is great news (GNOME,[1] Wikimedia[2]). [1]: https://wiki.gnome.org/Initiatives/DevelopmentInfrastructure/ https://wiki.gnome.org/Initiatives/DevelopmentInfrastructure... [2]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Phabricator https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Phabrica...
- technics256 9y ago
  Care to elaborate on the GitHub python issues for someone not totally in the loop? Thanks!
  - zanny 9y ago
    It isn't so much UX now, it is that you are bonding a lot of locked-in parts of your ecosystem to a proprietary platform. The issues, wiki, CI, and user-ecosystem of github aren't portable. If Github shut down, changed their policies, or just simply did something you don't like, you have no recourse if you bond your software to their platform. If you use gitlab, phabricator, gogs, or any other open source solution, either you are hosting it yourself - everyone wins - or you are using a centralized host equivalent to github, except now if they pull the rug out from under you you still have all the open source releases up to that point that you can pivot to - and you wouldn't necessarily need to self host, because someone will pick up the reins.
    - eddieroger 9y ago
      I agree that Issues are pretty locked, but otherwise it's fine, and you don't have to use GitHub Issues to track work if you don't want to. CI is mostly drive around hooks, and those should be portable. The wiki is just a collection of Markdown documents, so you could pull those off and put them anywhere else you want. Ecosystems are tied by default, so not much you can do there I suppose. I agree with the sentiment, but i think the risk is worth it for a lot of people, and I say that hosting my own private GitLab server.

rejschaap 9y ago

I am very curious how many devs will stop and how many will start contributing because of this move.

akerro 9y ago

Now just please make use of https://hosted.weblate.org/ https://hosted.weblate.org/ for translations

bburger71 9y ago

To be fair, I think you're just bad at using computers. They make these things called aliases, which let you make up helpful mnemonics if you struggle to remember the commands. Also, 5 years of experience, but you have to google commands? The manpage is right there, why does google and the internet ever have to get involved? If after 5 years of "using" a tool as powerful as git, and you have to google basic git commands, I'm not sure if you ever really spent any time learning how to use git at all or ever read the manpage. It's something that is common today in our form-over-function tech, but something I dearly miss. Read the manpage, maybe you'll discover git is not "junk".

dang 9y ago
We've banned this account for trolling. Would you please not create accounts to break the site guidelines here? We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14534872 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14534872 and marked it off-topic.