Paint/stroke outline is a command that paints the outline of a selection or path. My preferred way is to do this via the selection editor, which is a basic menu

Paint/stroke outline is a command that paints the outline of a selection or path. My preferred way is to do this via the selection editor, which is a basic menu (typically next to layouts) that gets activated after a selection has taken place. Pressing this button paints the outline with your tool of choice, e.g. a pencil or a brush. I don't disagree that one click is better than two, and yes I also don't know why the GIMP developers are so resistant to providing a basic "shapes" tool, but at the same time, clicking an extra button to paint the outline of a shaped selection is not super complicated either, and if what you got from the above was "carefully run your mouse along the outline", I don't think you'd do much better in Photoshop either. As for repeating a basic shape a bunch of times, what I typically do is create the first in a couple of clicks as above, and then copy paste or save it as a layer and duplicate away. Again, not the super complicated "you have to manually draw multiple outlines with your mouse" horror story you're trying to make it sound like...