17 ms·

Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

227 points by sacrosanct 3y ago

superkuh 3y ago
GIMP is still a Gtk2 program.
- capableweb 3y ago
  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.
  - superkuh 3y ago
    Gtk3 and Gtk4 have been ...well, gimped, and don't have many features. They've been removed in Gtk3/4 by GNOME developers because their DE does not prioritize things like keyboard entry (as compared to mouse use, see gtkfilechooserwidget.c in gtk3/4 not supporting keyboard based pasting of file paths without errors, https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/5872 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/5872). Gtk2 hasn't fallen victim to this slow erosion of functionality.
    - pengaru 3y ago
      I doubt breakages like the one you linked are deliberate, there's just a severe lack of manpower. My firsthand knowledge of such things is quite stale nowadays, but I get the impression the RH desktop group is barely on life support at this point. That GTK4 happened at all strikes me as surprising, but could be interesting long-term in terms of modernized GPU support for the toolkit attracting new usage/developers. The real question is do enough people even care about GTK anymore to make use of it in the future. I'm inclined to believe the current crop of devs want $hipster-language-native GUI packages. Not awkward quasi-"idiomatic" bindings and FFI wrapping an archaic C library like GTK/glib.
      - superkuh 3y ago
        Right. The example I gave, gtkfilechooserwidget.c, is such a mess of spaghetti code that the remaining Gtk developers don't want to touch it. Despite me bringing it up with them once per year and even providing a partial patch to work off of. But of course that didn't stop them from messing with it in 2014 and breaking it and leaving it in a broken state. The developer that broke it, mclassen, is still there and still explicitly says not having keyboard filepath paste is not a bug. Despite it giving an error message. re: Gtk4, they're already moving on to Gkt5 (wayland only though https://www.phoronix.com/news/GTK5-Might-Drop-X11 https://www.phoronix.com/news/GTK5-Might-Drop-X11).
        pengaru 3y ago
        There's no mention of the issue being keyboard-specific nor patches or comments from mclassen in the issue you linked. Maybe you linked the wrong one? Looks like a canonical file path (as opposed to dir path) paste handling bug in general, which seems like something worth fixing regardless of one's stance on keyboard paste.
        superkuh 3y ago
        I talked to them myself on #gtk on IRC (both on gimpnet in the old days and libera in modern times). Most previous issues with this bug have been removed from the bug tracker(s). This is just the latest one submitted by a helpful dev in channel who discovered it applied to Gtk4 too when I brought up the Gtk3 version this year. Now that they know it's in Gtk4 too they might do something. To understand how it's keyboard specific you have to know about what features were removed. In the past you could set the file chooser dialog to have either a text entry field or the path-bar mouse buttons as the default. This was through org.gtk.Settings.FileChooser location-mode. While this gsetting still remains gtkfilechooserwidget.c was changed so it no longer respects those settings and always forces only the mouse based path-bar input mode. This means now when a file path is pasted with ctrl-v (or middle mouse click paste?) the entirely wrong function tries to handle it and this function errors out because it's not expecting file path input.
      - 3y ago
  - bitwize 3y ago
    While GTK started off as the GIMP Toolkit, it has since become the GNOME Toolkit, so it doesn't really track GIMP's needs anymore.
  - formerly_proven 3y ago
    They can port GIMP to the QML-based UI framework used by Muse 4.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
      I would estimate that would be a 3 person-year project, and the result will contain precisely zero improvements for any user (even if theoretically it might be easier to bring various improvements after that is done). That is a hell of an ask.
      - formerly_proven 3y ago
        Would be funny though And would it be more work than the gtk2->gtk3 port?
        PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
        Substantially more work. However, what people do not realize about these "toolkit ports", whether within a family (GTK 3->4) or across them (Qt -> GTK), is that the reason they take so long is that it is almost impossible, when having to go through the vast majority of the codebase and change stuff everywhere, to avoid the realization and/or temptation that there are better (or at least different) ways to do things. If you could suppress that inclination (and its not clear that doing so is a good idea), and simply do as close to a 1:1 replacement where required (which for cross-family ports is everywhere), the port could be a lot faster. But it is extremely hard to resist that, because the non 1:1 replacement stuff just appears so right.
- radium3d 3y ago
  But, haven't the gimp team been working on refactoring/modularization of all of the tools? I think this is part of an effort to modernize. I haven't been keeping up with it but I think I read this several years ago. They stated in 2018 "GIMP 3.0 will be relying on GTK3, a much newer version of the toolkit." not sure if that ever happened? https://www.gimp.org/news/2019/01/02/gimp-and-gegl-in-2018/ https://www.gimp.org/news/2019/01/02/gimp-and-gegl-in-2018/
  - superkuh 3y ago
    They're trying. And I appreciate that. Unfortunately it's still on-going in 2023.
    - radium3d 3y ago
      Seems they are very close though in the latest release candidate for Gimp 3.x "GTK+3 port officially done GIMP 3.0 has been known as the GTK+3 port version, so you will be happy to read that this port is finally over. To be fair, we still have a few minor deprecation warnings here and there, but nothing like the hundreds we used to have." https://www.gimp.org/news/2023/07/09/gimp-2-99-16-released/#gtk3-port-officially-done https://www.gimp.org/news/2023/07/09/gimp-2-99-16-released/#...
  - cratermoon 3y ago
    2.99.16 is the latest build on the 3.0 path: https://www.gimp.org/news/2023/07/09/gimp-2-99-16-released/ https://www.gimp.org/news/2023/07/09/gimp-2-99-16-released/
- Andrex 3y ago
  Not for long. https://www.gimp.org/news/2023/07/09/gimp-2-99-16-released/#gtk3-port-officially-done https://www.gimp.org/news/2023/07/09/gimp-2-99-16-released/#...
capableweb 3y ago
If Blender could radically update their UI and UX after 25 years of the initial conception, I feel like any (FOSS) project could do it too, no matter how many options and technical details the software has.
- bestouff 3y ago
  Blender has something else. Loads of money compared to Gimp.
  - DonHopkins 3y ago
    Blender EARNED every cent of its loads of money be being RESPONSIVE TO ITS USERS.
  - chongli 3y ago
    Did the money come first? Or the redesign? I remember using Blender back in the day and it was really confusing. It seems amazing that anyone would have poured so much money into it back then.
    - n3storm 3y ago
      Good question. Blender lead and community created a huge innertia with projects and conquest to raise funding. So having a vision comes first, then the funding, and after that a redesign.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - CuriousCosmic 3y ago
      Yeah a few studios started picking it up prior to the redesign because it was free and a lot of new animators/designers knew it because it was a free tool they could learn. That was all pre-redesign. Their support got the ball rolling and then eventually Amazon and a bunch of big studios threw their weight in but I'm not sure how many of them were involved in the redesign.
  - 3y ago
Tao3300 3y ago
> [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.
- IshKebab 3y ago
  The worst is Inkscape. They somehow manage to put every option in the last place I look.
  - cozzyd 3y ago
    I still haven't gotten used to Inkscape's newer UI.
  - omoikane 3y ago
    I found that Inkscape mostly has everything where I expect them, but maybe I just got used to it. I wish the "filters" and "extensions" menus would be better organized since they appear to be just dumping grounds for all advanced features, but I thought the core functionality of drawing shapes and curves were reasonable.
  - syntheweave 3y ago
    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.
- mega_dean 3y ago
  > my first guess is usually wrong I had the same experience, and searching for answers using keywords was not very effective. There are so many features that the terms I guessed were often a different concept in GIMP, leading to a bunch of irrelevant results. I have found that ChatGPT solves this problem very well, so I don't even try searching first anymore. I can verbosely explain what I am trying to accomplish, and it tells me "that is called X in GIMP, and here is how to use it: ...". A recent example is that the Bucket Fill tool was filling in adjacent pixels that were a slightly different color than the one I clicked on. ChatGPT told me this is called the "threshold" and how to change it to 0 so it only filled exact matches. I would have searched for something like "gimp bucket fill sensitivity" or "gimp bucket fill precision", then had to read through a forum answer or the GIMP documentation to see that term.
phendrenad2 3y ago
Excuses abound. "There are too many features" So? Do the work. Organize them. "GTK doesn't have xxx, doesn't allow yyy, we have to wait until GTK 5 comes out..." No? Just do the work. Add those features to GTK itself or find a workaround. Open-source is built one patch at a time, so a big rewrite can never happen. But what's worse, to me, is that people build up this cognitive dissonance that it's some framework's fault that it doesn't have the right dropdown widget yet.
- alpaca128 3y ago
  Nobody is stopping you from contributing. A lot of FOSS projects could do a lot of amazing things if they had enough people who "just do the work".
  - eviks 3y ago
    That's too simplistic of a view, there are way too many gatekeepers with poor UI design sensibilities which won't just merge your "just done the work to improve UI" contribution, which in turn leads to lower chances getting people to contribute such improvements
    - alpaca128 3y ago
      The linked article talks about a fork created to redesign Gimp's UI, so there were no gatekeepers.
      - eviks 3y ago
        My point was about merging a fork, not creating it.
      - phendrenad2 3y ago
        I didn't see the GIMP project speaking up when Glimpse was accused of being "woke". And also, there's zero chance that the GIMP project would ever switch to the Glimpse codebase. Forking things usually results in the original thing persisting forever out of spite for those who dared to fork it.
wredue 3y ago
I will forever be against weird “hidden” menus and even more against the idiotic replacing of clear, obvious text based menuing with bullshit, stupid, mentally handicapped “just memorize what our developers decided these images mean lol Hurr durr”. Absolutely hate this redesign. The correct response to a “too small viewport” for anyone serious is to buy a better monitor with a larger resolution, not to redesign menus in to bullshit obscurity.
- rebuilder 3y ago
  A sufficiently complex menu is not really that discoverable, either - you end up having to memorize what category the devs have decided to file a particular function under.
  - genman 3y ago
    Gimp menu system is reasonably logical (except perhaps some minor exceptions like having options under edit menu (but this is also problem with most of the programs)).
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - sparkie 3y ago
    Menus used to have at least some consistency across programs. If you knew where an option was in one program, it was usually in the same place in another, or at least similar options were in similar places. The UI designers of the past understood that convention trumps invention. You shouldn't need to "discover" something in 10 different ways when you use 10 different programs. Now everyone wants to "innovate in UI design" and there’s no consistency between the programs you use. It was probably Apple that led the "minimalist UI" trend, but at least Apple have consistency across their applications. The GNOMEs started trying to copy Apple's design cues with Gkt3/GNOME3 but completely missed the mark.
  - ozim 3y ago
    My problem with UX discussions as such is that there is no user context. Removing "clear obvious text menu" might make it less friendly for casual users or first time users but makes space for stuff that experienced users have use of. Sufficiently experienced user needs to have menu organized the same way between versions if they use it for years they already and know what they want, probably just use keyboard shortcuts anyway. Discoverable menu items in complex menu IMO is not some holy grail. I think people read too much in "Apple design" and expect everything "should be easy". If you are first time user of CAD or advanced graphics manipulation application you are going to have to put time to find out tools and where they are. For example I like foldable left-hand menu on web apps where if I know the icons meaning I can fold it but for first time use of application I get text+icon.
renewiltord 3y ago
The one thing I can say is that fuzzy search like IntelliJ is a really good interface for experienced workflow. Maybe an AI fuzzy search would help with discoverability.
- evbogue 3y ago
  I was thinking this would be a good use case for AI. Perhaps you could have a Gimp co-pilot that makes suggestions about what you could do with the image after uploading it to a server somewhere. Then we would know if the AI is more or less intelligent based on whether it can actually figure out how to find that specific blur function within all of the various dropdowns and sub-menus.
  - EspressoGPT 3y ago
    Requiring a copilot is a proof for bad UI design.
torstenvl 3y ago
This 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.
- kennywinker 3y ago
  Meanwhile gimp probably has lower % usage rate than it did 20 years ago. Improvements are needed, and this is just menus in a popup box anyway
  - torstenvl 3y ago
    > just menus in a popup box anyway Please don't do this. You know that isn't true. If someone wants menus in a pop up box, you can simply hide the menu bar until the user presses Alt (or F12 depending on your OS's convention). Inventing an entire new weird system for pure novelty while saying "fuck you" to accessibility for disabled people... is just not okay behavior.
    - gaganyaan 3y ago
      How does that inhibit accessibility?
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
- ohdannyboy 3y ago
  It would not shock me to learn that GIMP has been a multi decade study to find out how bad a UX has to be before the FOSS community starts to care.
  - rchaud 3y ago
    UX affordances are different when the price is zero. I learned GIMP the hard way, first because of Photoshop's pricing, and second because Photoshop's UX wasn't that much cleaner when it came to doing anything outside of trivial layer operations.
542458 3y ago
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 help discoverability very much, as users still have to hunt through highly nested menus. Looking at the screenshots here, I don’t think you actually need search to make those menus more manageable. One screenshot of current GIMP shows a menu tree that looks like “filter->render->noise->solid noise…”. I think you could probably combine the entire noise submenu from that tree, and make it instead a segmented control on the actual “noise” dialog that chooses your type of noise. I suspect dropping the “render” level as well would also be good. “Render” is a bit of a jargon-y term in the context of graphics editing, and I don’t think it means much to most people using it. Furthermore, the top “filter” menu isn’t actually all that long, and people generally prefer wide flatter trees to narrower deeper trees. So, I’d pitch for a simpler menu that would just be “filter->noise…”. By flattening and combining, I think that menu could be made much more usable and discoverable.
- skrebbel 3y ago
  > 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. This is the core point made in the article.
  - echelon 3y ago
    How do you support discoverability, sleek work areas with minimal interfaces such as search, and power users at the same time? What does that look like?
    - et1337 3y ago
      Look at the Blender UI. Every command is searchable via F3, available via menus, and sometimes also available via a keyboard shortcut.
KaiserPro 3y ago
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.
- layer8 3y ago
  GIMP lost me when they switched to flat monochrome icons. Well, I still use the old version.
  - Izkata 3y ago
    IIRC a bunch of them didn't even just go monochrome, they removed small hints to what it actually did (like little arrows that showed what the transformation actually was). Switching back to the old icons was also the first thing I did.
  - ndiddy 3y ago
    You can change the icons back to the color ones in the settings.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- hurryer 3y ago
  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?
  - KaiserPro 3y ago
    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 https://github.com/bootchk/resynthesizer
DustinBrett 3y ago
Would be cool if GIMP could move to the web like Photoshop is doing.
- gaudystead 3y ago
  Just curious... What is your logic behind preferring a web based application?
- 1aqp 3y ago
  NO! It would not be cool. I like programs to work on an off-line computer.
- lupusreal 3y ago
  [dead]
spandextwins 3y ago
It's open source, fork it and knock yourself out.
Izkata 3y ago
> And the same applies, for example, to moving selections, because in GIMP, you need to press Ctrl+Alt and then drag to move the contents of the selection, which is not how people expect this to work coming from many other applications. Again, the only way they can find this out is by watching a tutorial or reading the user manual. This is a shortcut for Cut+Paste, which I always use anyway because I find it more intuitive.
darklycan51 3y ago
It's better than what currently there is but why does open source software have to have such bad UI? what are those lock and checkboxes? a 5 year old could come up with better icons... What's up with the thick lines around UI elements? it all looks so 2008. It sometimes looks to me like absolutely 0 designers are actually involved in open source, at all
- rchaud 3y ago
  GIMP is a power user tool, like Photoshop, or Excel, or a Bloomberg terminal. If you don't need all that, Canva or the photo editor on your phone will offer a simpler UI.
  - krapp 3y ago
    No "power user" is touching GIMP with a ten foot pole.
    - rchaud 3y ago
      I use GIMP features that the basic apps don't have, therefore I'm a GIMP power user.
- prmoustache 3y ago
  > a 5 year old could come up with better icons... Apparently none did.
  - darklycan51 3y ago
    I think that just shows how terribly non programmer friendly open source development is, designers and the like do not touch places like github, the whole model needs a redo to make it easier for non programmers to participate in open source development
    - prmoustache 3y ago
      That just show how people much prefer yelling at clouds than doing stuff.
rco8786 3y ago
Somewhat tangential but is there any compelling reason to use Gimp over Photopea in 2023?
- prokoudine 3y ago
  16/32-bit per channel support.
- cozzyd 3y ago
  Never heard of photopea but doesn't appear to be free software or to run locally.
- rchaud 3y ago
  Sure: - no ads - no "runs best on Chrome" - no network connectivity dependencies
  - Gualdrapo 3y ago
    - No need for an account to unlock all features
tantaman 3y ago
What about an integrated LLM assistant for GIMP? Seems like that's the future for any professional application (e.g., PhotoShop, CAD, Reason)
- timbit42 3y ago
  Sure. Then we could have a Beowulf Cluster of them.
  - tantaman 3y ago
    LLMs on consumer grade hardware are a thing and will become more so. Something that only needs to understand the space of the application is certainly attainable.
    - DonHopkins 3y ago
      Whoosh. That was the sound of you missing a hilarious joke. I guess you weren't around slashdot back then. Fortunately it's 2023, and I have at my disposal an LLM to explain the joke that doesn't necessarily require such an extensive computing setup. User: Explain the joke. ChatGPT: The joke here revolves around a classic internet meme that originated from discussions on Slashdot, an online community similar to Reddit or Hacker News but older and more focused on technology and science. The meme is about creating a "Beowulf Cluster," which refers to a network of computers configured to work together on complex tasks, effectively creating a powerful supercomputer from less powerful individual machines. The original context for this meme was discussions where someone would invariably suggest, often irrelevantly, that a problem could be solved by creating a Beowulf Cluster. It became a running joke to propose a Beowulf Cluster as a solution to virtually any tech-related problem, regardless of whether it made sense or not. In the conversation you're referring to, when "timbit42" mentions a Beowulf Cluster in response to the idea of integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT into applications like GIMP, Photoshop, or CAD, they are likely invoking this meme. The joke is in the overkill of suggesting a massively parallel computing solution (like a Beowulf Cluster) for integrating an LLM into a software application, which is a task that doesn't necessarily require such an extensive computing setup.
eviks 3y ago
Universal search is great, as is the overall command pallette idea, every app should have it Althout the usual menu navigation mechanism should also stick around since it provides consistent invocation of a command with a sequence of keybinds (like File, Open). Fuzzy search doesn't do that since you can match something else. Key combos require too much memorization (though it doesn't have to be the typical horizontal menu at the top, you could have a "modal" navigation mode in the same command pallette) And to answer the question: of course it's possible, just highly unlikely
IshKebab 3y ago
Horizon EDA is really fantastic and the first usable open source EDA tool I've used. (I've not tried LibrePCB yet so that may be ok, but I've tried all the others; they all have awful UX including Kicad. A lot of the commercial tools have insane UX too - look up how you copy & paste in Eagle.) Solvespace is the only usable open source CAD software I've found and I have tried all of them. Unfortunately it has some awkward limitations (no bevels or fillets is probably the biggest). If he can take the excellent Solvespace constraint solver and make something usable that would be amazing!
- garaetjjte 3y ago
  Solvespace is great but any slightly more complex model and its geometry kernel gives up :(
lofaszvanitt 3y ago
Does this man ever worked with photoshop? What is he talking about? Of course there is a menu, just like in PS. Of course it is overwhelming at first. The biggest reasont most of the UI/UX sucks, because those who create the program never actually use it day by day. So easy. Use your own program and whenever you get frustrated it shows you that you have done something wrong or awkward and it needs adjustment. Another important thing is to drop the "this must look and feel different than photoshop" stance (more vs less) and it will be a-ok. And don't be afraid to borrow things from the bigheaded ones if that works well. Krita and Gimp's biggest issue is that most of the tools are implemented in a non intuitive way. Everything is a disorganized mess. And since PS doesn't run under linux, this gets on my nerves. For example in Krita you can't resize a crop rectangle with the mouse that holds its aspect ratio... WHYYY? And why does the crop tool forgets the previous size values? Little things like these show that the creators NEVER EVER use their own fucking program.
- prokoudine 3y ago
  > Does this man ever worked with photoshop? What is he talking about? Of course there is a menu, just like in PS. I'm the OP and for the life of me I can't figure out what you are talking about. Seems like you are conflating GIMP and Photoshop and reading the post as if it suggested that either GIMP or Photoshop don't have a menu, which is absurd — there was no such claim. > Another important thing is to drop the "this must look and feel different than photoshop" stance There has never been such a stance in the first place. As far as I can recall (which is about 20 years back), the stance has always been "please explain why your proposed change is good, don't hide behind "because this is how Photoshop does it", it's lazy".
- foobiekr 3y ago
  I think that’s right. Every time I go look at it I just marvel at how awful it is, like an alien designing photo editing software by looking at some screen shots and feature lists but never editing a single image. Compare with Affinity’s software - they are more consistent than present day Adobe but copied all the good, same as Adobe did with Quantel.
- cycomanic 3y ago
refulgentis 3y ago
Just in case author happens to read comments: There's this sudden brick wall of understandability in the "Interaction Hints" section. It's not clear what the visual hints are in the screenshot because there's a number of UI elements present. And "obviously" is carrying too much load, you'd have to be be familiar with Blender to know.
- prokoudine 3y ago
  Thanks, fixed :)
cycomanic 3y ago
It's somewhat ironic that the author is essentially proposing a blender-like UI for gimp, considering that blenders UI is one of the most maligned UIs out there. For the record I think the blender UI is pretty genius for an extremely complex graphics program and it could also work with gimp. Also the loud shouting around blenders UI have died down a lot in recent years, which I attribute to 2 things: 1. the great work done to make the UI more discoverable. 2. Blender having become almost a standard so there is lots of tutorials and it's now much more often the first 3d graphics program that people get exposed to (hence less it doesn't work like Maya,... complaints).
- cyanydeez 3y ago
  I got hooked on the 2.78 UI And can't manage to do more than half of what I know blender can do the bitching is mostly the disconnect from version to version.
- taneq 3y ago
  What does "blender's UI" even mean these days? It's been completely revamped since I last used it, which personally is annoying since I have no idea how to do anything in Blender any more, but objectively is great because the old UI was... challenging... and now it seems to align much better with other professional 3D software.
corkybeta 3y ago
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://github.com/ubuntu-mate/mate-hud https://jamcnaughton.com/2015/10/19/hud-for-xubuntu/#jp-carousel-1364 https://jamcnaughton.com/2015/10/19/hud-for-xubuntu/#jp-caro...
- flas9sd 3y ago
  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 https://imgur.com/a/5XlgTO3 And the official docs: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Unity/HUD https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Unity/HUD
Jerry2 3y ago
Since moving to 10-bit color, I've had to abandon GIMP because it doesn't support it. It's the only application that's giving me trouble so I've just switched over to Krita for occasional image manipulation.
pmontra 3y ago
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 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 that what you really want is MS Paint from Windows 3.1
- 7speter 3y ago
  Lots of great tutorials on Youtube
- Zambyte 3y ago
  > At that point you realize that what you really want is MS Paint from Windows 3.1 Or a drawing program like Krita.
  - wruza 3y ago
    Or Paint.NET, which does maintain aspect ratio on shift.
    - EspressoGPT 3y ago
      I switched to macOS several years ago and the only thing I still miss from Windows is something like Paint.NET.
      - Zambyte 3y ago
        What's wrong with Krita?
        johnchristopher 3y ago
        I don't know about the Mac version but I find the Linux version a bit on the slow side and the interface look and feel is a bit off to me but I chalk it up to "that's because I am not used to it and I have decades of light photoshop usage ingrained in my brain". But don't get me wrong. Krita is awesome and it's a better substitution to Photoshop than Gimp is.
thibran 3y ago
How difficult would it be to train an AI with all GIMP documentation and online Q&A's and ship an offline support-chat with GIMP?
ghostly_s 3y ago
The problems with Gimp have nothing to do with not having a sufficient UI paradigm to contain Gimp's oh-so-precious functionality; it's that the project leadership refuses to consider that tue esoteric universally-loathed UI paradigms they came up with might be worse than the prevailing conventions.
- prokoudine 3y ago
  > the project leadership refuses to consider that tue esoteric universally-loathed UI paradigms they came up with might be worse than the prevailing conventions Do they though? I've been in and around that project for many years and one common scenario that I've seen replaying over and over (and over) again is when people request something and then understand "please elaborate why this UI solution is better" or "can't right now, too many things to work on" response as a flat-out refusal.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
great_psy 3y ago
Slightly off topic, but for anybody looking to make the transition from photoshop to gimp, check out this extension: https://github.com/Diolinux/PhotoGIMP https://github.com/Diolinux/PhotoGIMP It adjusts shortcuts and a bit of the interface to feel a lot more familiar. I’ve been using photoshop for a few years and just transitions to gimp a few months ago, and so far I did not miss any of the photoshop functionality. (I only do personal photography manipulation, no design or any sort of drawing that might need a tablet)
agumonkey 3y ago
Go study Alias Maya, it was a solid timeless ergonomic base. Modo too (it was the equivalent of FP for UIs in 2000s, rare). Photoshop is probably still extremely efficient.
wruza 3y ago
None of modern UIs are built the way I’d like to work with tool apps as an amateur, nonpro, jack of all trades master of none. I only use a small subset of functions. Old programs which had programmable toolbars in 98/2k+ era were the most useful in that regard. I just set these toolbars (and key bindings) up for frequent functions and was fine with it up until when it disappeared. It reappeared in windows start menu, but that’s it. Configurable UIs are obsolete and over, so we have to explore various common denominators. So that new users could still struggle with finding menu items and power users could still struggle with quick access. Because setting up your workspace went out of fashion.
_c3ag 3y ago
NO! 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 binaries exists. but i also think that if you are highly creative, there's so much to-do with simple tools edit: not that Gimp can't do complex stuff but i remember clear sizing the boobs of a woman once at Photoshop and having some trouble on how-to with Gimp at home...
- DonHopkins 3y ago
  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-blender/6171 https://devtalk.blender.org/t/pie-menu-development-for-blend... Blender Pie Menu Editor: https://blendermarket.com/products/pie-menu-editor https://blendermarket.com/products/pie-menu-editor Gnome-Pie (wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnome-Pie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnome-Pie Gnome-Pie (github): https://schneegans.github.io/gnome-pie https://schneegans.github.io/gnome-pie Gnome-Pie 0.6.1: https://vimeo.com/125339537 https://vimeo.com/125339537 Fly-Pie 7: GNOME Shell 40+ and a new WYSIWYG Menu Editor! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRT3O9-H5Xs 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 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTdfnUDMO9k Follow and support the project on Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/schneegans https://ko-fi.com/schneegans Kando on GitHub: https://github.com/kando-menu/kando 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 https://schneegans.github.io/news/2012/10/10/bachelor-thesis The Trace-Menu: https://vimeo.com/51073078 https://vimeo.com/51073078 The Coral-Menu: https://vimeo.com/51072812 https://vimeo.com/51072812 More of his great stuff: https://schneegans.github.io/ https://schneegans.github.io/ 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 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 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 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://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/rainbow/people/neilw.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(1963_computer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(1963_computer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-7 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-7 David S H Rosenthal: Kids Today Have No Idea: https://blog.dshr.org/2018/11/kids-today-have-no-idea.html https://blog.dshr.org/2018/11/kids-today-have-no-idea.html
b5n 3y ago
Just to contrast the negativity here I'd like to say that GIMP is great software, and I really appreciate all the hard work that has been put into it over the years. It's powerful, easily scriptable, and I'm eternally grateful for everyone's contributions to the project. https://www.gimp.org/docs/ https://www.gimp.org/docs/
- EspressoGPT 3y ago
  Have you actually been using it?
  - smoldesu 3y ago
    I use it regularly, but my use case doesn't really extend beyond compositing images. Works great for me though, my only complaint is the startup time.
    - prokoudine 3y ago
      If the startup time is your complaint, you are probably still on 2.8, that is, before fonts started lazy-loading.
- 123pie123 3y ago
  it is a great tool I've been using for over 3 years and soo many UI features are a pain - the main one for me is using text / fonts, it feels like it's designed to fight you
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
nabla9 3y ago
All 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.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- BHSPitMonkey 3y ago
  Sounds like you are sort of describing GEGL in the context of GIMP, though it would be difficult to draw that abstraction in a way that makes implementing competing GUIs straightforward or DRY.
- thomastjeffery 3y ago
  That's true for literally all software. We would be much better off if GUI was a replacement for the shell instead of a replacement for every individual shell utility.
- riotnrrd 3y ago
  This is what we did at ILM, with our in-house software package Zeno. The lowest level of complete functionality was the "Sg" namespace (short for Scene Graph). Above that lived user-and-SDK-friendly commandline utilities layer (SgCmd) that was used for all scripting. Above that, finally, was the Oz layer -- the graphical UI. Oz actions called SgCmds, but never saw or touched the Sg layer. In theory, Oz was UI toolkit agnostic but, as anyone who's ever done UI work will understand, it rapidly became wedded to the toolkit we used (a heavily customized version of Tk). This made the eventual switching to Qt very, very difficult. So difficult it nearly destroyed the artists' faith in the R&D group. (Extremely late delivery, buggy, and coming at the manpower cost of not doing any improvements on the tool itself for a year and a half.)
  - bsder 3y ago
    How did Python scripting work with that? It sounds like Python could only call the SgCmd layer but couldn't redfine anything at the Oz layer. And, how did Python call that SgCmd layer? If instead you wanted Tcl (or Ruby or ...) to call that SgCmd layer, how would that work? Interested in this as I'm very much bumping into problems like this right now.
amelius 3y ago
I think they should focus on incorporating LLMs and stable diffusion and make them more easily accessible.
wafriedemann 3y ago
GIMP was a horrible outdated experience for me >15 years ago and I assume it hasn't gotten any better.
SebastianKra 3y ago
I'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 reinvent drawing applications.
- kiney 3y ago
  Please no. I very much prefer the multi window UI of gimp, especially with multiple screens
- peebeebee 3y ago
  Photopea did this, and on web
- replete 3y ago
  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
  - deaddodo 3y ago
    > 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 They used to have a Windows build that was like this called "Gimpshop": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIMPshop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIMPshop
  - 3y ago
e12e 3y ago
There's also photoGimp: https://github.com/Diolinux/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.
shaggie76 3y ago
I have a photography side-hustle and I use GIMP occasionally for advanced edits I can't do in my raw developer. In my semi-regular use over the last 3 years I've never found the UI/UX to be a problem but rather find myself coveting features GIMP either doesn't have or doesn't seem to do very well (smart subject masking, context-aware fill, etc). I'm getting what I pay for, so I don't feel I have any right to complain, but as it drifts farther behind the commercial offerings I suspect debates about the UX might not be what GIMP needs.
deleted 3y ago
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DonHopkins 3y ago
>Interaction hints >Another interesting thing here is that when you do something like drawing a line, for example, you get these nice visual hints here, just above the status bar: >Interaction hints >The idea is coming from Blender obviously, and it would make a lot of sense to use this in applications like GIMP and Inkscape. Here is a good reason why. The first place I ever saw this feature was on the Lisp Machine. It was called the "mouse-documentation" line. Operating the Lisp Machine: http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/symbolics/LM-2/Operating_the_Lisp_Machine.pdf http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/symbolics/L... >1.3 The Mouse (pp. 3) >The mouse is a pointing device that can be moved around on a flat surface. These motions are sensed by the Lisp Machine, which usually responds by moving the cursor around on the screen in a corresponding manner. The shape of the cursor varies, depending on context. See chapter 10, page 40. >There are three buttons on the mouse, called Left, Middle and Right. They are used to specify operations to be performed. Typically the user points at something with the mouse and specifies an operatin by clicking the mouse buttons. Rapid double clicks are conventionally distinguished from single clicks. Thus, in any specific context, there are up to sex operations that can be performed with the mouse, invoked by Left, Left Double, Middle, Middle Double, Right, and Right Double. Some of these operations are local to particular programs such as the editor, and some are defined more widely across the system. >Typically operations available by clicking the mouse button are listed at the bottom of the screen. This display changes as you move the mouse around or run different programs. >Sometimes holding a mouse button down continuously for a period of time may also be defined to perform some operation, for example drawing a curve on the screen. This will be indicated by the word "Hold". For example, "Middle Hold" means to click the middle mouse button down and hold it down, releasing it only when the operation is complete. "Left Double Hold"means to click the left mouse button twice, holding it down the second time until the operation is complete. >Occasionally a long click is distinguished from a short one, as a Morse Code dash is distinguished from a dot. In cases it doesn't matter exactly how long the button is held down, as long as it is perceptibly longer than the usual rapid sgtrike. Such a click will be described by the word "Long" as in "Right Long". >The mouse is completely "soft", like the keyboard: The Lisp Machine can be programmed to interpret the mouse in any desired fashion. The protocol that has been chosen, however, is extremely general and should suffice for almost all needs. [...] >2.1 The Geography of the Display [...] >2.1.2 The Who-Line and Run-Lights (pp. 5) [...] >Above the who-line there is a line of mouse-documentation, which is displayed in inverse video to make it easy to move your eyes to it from someplace else on the screen. This line tells you what the buttons on the mouse would do if you clicked them with the mouse where it currently is. If the line is blank, it means the default mouse buttons are in effect; clicking Left will select the window pointed-to, and clicking Right will get you the system menu (these are explained later).
akasakahakada 3y ago
>>> the team tried to solve that with a search Before that you should fix the names. Searching for Gaussian would't give me Gaussian blur because the script for that is in a different name. And if you kill the menu, you are killing the whole project.
- prokoudine 3y ago
  > Searching for Gaussian would't give me Gaussian blur On the contrary, it's the first item in search results. The very first one.
dither8 3y ago
I don't hate the UI choice made in Dune 3D. But I still think the menu bar approach is the best for complex applications. I don't like the GTK crowd's approach in regards trying to make everything work within the GNOME design paradigm. It doesn't look good on all platforms, and feels more hamfisted then anything else. Sad to see some in the comments criticise GIMP so hard, I get it doesn't compete with professional proprietary software. But it's still a very useful image editing tool, that I use a lot.

227 points by sacrosanct 3y ago

superkuh 3y ago

GIMP is still a Gtk2 program.

capableweb 3y ago
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.
- superkuh 3y ago
  Gtk3 and Gtk4 have been ...well, gimped, and don't have many features. They've been removed in Gtk3/4 by GNOME developers because their DE does not prioritize things like keyboard entry (as compared to mouse use, see gtkfilechooserwidget.c in gtk3/4 not supporting keyboard based pasting of file paths without errors, https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/5872 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/5872). Gtk2 hasn't fallen victim to this slow erosion of functionality.
  - pengaru 3y ago
    I doubt breakages like the one you linked are deliberate, there's just a severe lack of manpower. My firsthand knowledge of such things is quite stale nowadays, but I get the impression the RH desktop group is barely on life support at this point. That GTK4 happened at all strikes me as surprising, but could be interesting long-term in terms of modernized GPU support for the toolkit attracting new usage/developers. The real question is do enough people even care about GTK anymore to make use of it in the future. I'm inclined to believe the current crop of devs want $hipster-language-native GUI packages. Not awkward quasi-"idiomatic" bindings and FFI wrapping an archaic C library like GTK/glib.
    - superkuh 3y ago
      Right. The example I gave, gtkfilechooserwidget.c, is such a mess of spaghetti code that the remaining Gtk developers don't want to touch it. Despite me bringing it up with them once per year and even providing a partial patch to work off of. But of course that didn't stop them from messing with it in 2014 and breaking it and leaving it in a broken state. The developer that broke it, mclassen, is still there and still explicitly says not having keyboard filepath paste is not a bug. Despite it giving an error message. re: Gtk4, they're already moving on to Gkt5 (wayland only though https://www.phoronix.com/news/GTK5-Might-Drop-X11 https://www.phoronix.com/news/GTK5-Might-Drop-X11).
      - pengaru 3y ago
        There's no mention of the issue being keyboard-specific nor patches or comments from mclassen in the issue you linked. Maybe you linked the wrong one? Looks like a canonical file path (as opposed to dir path) paste handling bug in general, which seems like something worth fixing regardless of one's stance on keyboard paste.
        superkuh 3y ago
        I talked to them myself on #gtk on IRC (both on gimpnet in the old days and libera in modern times). Most previous issues with this bug have been removed from the bug tracker(s). This is just the latest one submitted by a helpful dev in channel who discovered it applied to Gtk4 too when I brought up the Gtk3 version this year. Now that they know it's in Gtk4 too they might do something. To understand how it's keyboard specific you have to know about what features were removed. In the past you could set the file chooser dialog to have either a text entry field or the path-bar mouse buttons as the default. This was through org.gtk.Settings.FileChooser location-mode. While this gsetting still remains gtkfilechooserwidget.c was changed so it no longer respects those settings and always forces only the mouse based path-bar input mode. This means now when a file path is pasted with ctrl-v (or middle mouse click paste?) the entirely wrong function tries to handle it and this function errors out because it's not expecting file path input.
    - 3y ago
- bitwize 3y ago
  While GTK started off as the GIMP Toolkit, it has since become the GNOME Toolkit, so it doesn't really track GIMP's needs anymore.
- formerly_proven 3y ago
  They can port GIMP to the QML-based UI framework used by Muse 4.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
    I would estimate that would be a 3 person-year project, and the result will contain precisely zero improvements for any user (even if theoretically it might be easier to bring various improvements after that is done). That is a hell of an ask.
    - formerly_proven 3y ago
      Would be funny though And would it be more work than the gtk2->gtk3 port?
      - PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
        Substantially more work. However, what people do not realize about these "toolkit ports", whether within a family (GTK 3->4) or across them (Qt -> GTK), is that the reason they take so long is that it is almost impossible, when having to go through the vast majority of the codebase and change stuff everywhere, to avoid the realization and/or temptation that there are better (or at least different) ways to do things. If you could suppress that inclination (and its not clear that doing so is a good idea), and simply do as close to a 1:1 replacement where required (which for cross-family ports is everywhere), the port could be a lot faster. But it is extremely hard to resist that, because the non 1:1 replacement stuff just appears so right.
radium3d 3y ago
But, haven't the gimp team been working on refactoring/modularization of all of the tools? I think this is part of an effort to modernize. I haven't been keeping up with it but I think I read this several years ago. They stated in 2018 "GIMP 3.0 will be relying on GTK3, a much newer version of the toolkit." not sure if that ever happened? https://www.gimp.org/news/2019/01/02/gimp-and-gegl-in-2018/ https://www.gimp.org/news/2019/01/02/gimp-and-gegl-in-2018/
- superkuh 3y ago
  They're trying. And I appreciate that. Unfortunately it's still on-going in 2023.
  - radium3d 3y ago
    Seems they are very close though in the latest release candidate for Gimp 3.x "GTK+3 port officially done GIMP 3.0 has been known as the GTK+3 port version, so you will be happy to read that this port is finally over. To be fair, we still have a few minor deprecation warnings here and there, but nothing like the hundreds we used to have." https://www.gimp.org/news/2023/07/09/gimp-2-99-16-released/#gtk3-port-officially-done https://www.gimp.org/news/2023/07/09/gimp-2-99-16-released/#...
- cratermoon 3y ago
  2.99.16 is the latest build on the 3.0 path: https://www.gimp.org/news/2023/07/09/gimp-2-99-16-released/ https://www.gimp.org/news/2023/07/09/gimp-2-99-16-released/
Andrex 3y ago
Not for long. https://www.gimp.org/news/2023/07/09/gimp-2-99-16-released/#gtk3-port-officially-done https://www.gimp.org/news/2023/07/09/gimp-2-99-16-released/#...

capableweb 3y ago

If Blender could radically update their UI and UX after 25 years of the initial conception, I feel like any (FOSS) project could do it too, no matter how many options and technical details the software has.

bestouff 3y ago
Blender has something else. Loads of money compared to Gimp.
- DonHopkins 3y ago
  Blender EARNED every cent of its loads of money be being RESPONSIVE TO ITS USERS.
- chongli 3y ago
  Did the money come first? Or the redesign? I remember using Blender back in the day and it was really confusing. It seems amazing that anyone would have poured so much money into it back then.
  - n3storm 3y ago
    Good question. Blender lead and community created a huge innertia with projects and conquest to raise funding. So having a vision comes first, then the funding, and after that a redesign.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - CuriousCosmic 3y ago
    Yeah a few studios started picking it up prior to the redesign because it was free and a lot of new animators/designers knew it because it was a free tool they could learn. That was all pre-redesign. Their support got the ball rolling and then eventually Amazon and a bunch of big studios threw their weight in but I'm not sure how many of them were involved in the redesign.
- 3y ago

Tao3300 3y ago

> [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.

IshKebab 3y ago
The worst is Inkscape. They somehow manage to put every option in the last place I look.
- cozzyd 3y ago
  I still haven't gotten used to Inkscape's newer UI.
- omoikane 3y ago
  I found that Inkscape mostly has everything where I expect them, but maybe I just got used to it. I wish the "filters" and "extensions" menus would be better organized since they appear to be just dumping grounds for all advanced features, but I thought the core functionality of drawing shapes and curves were reasonable.
- syntheweave 3y ago
  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.
mega_dean 3y ago
> my first guess is usually wrong I had the same experience, and searching for answers using keywords was not very effective. There are so many features that the terms I guessed were often a different concept in GIMP, leading to a bunch of irrelevant results. I have found that ChatGPT solves this problem very well, so I don't even try searching first anymore. I can verbosely explain what I am trying to accomplish, and it tells me "that is called X in GIMP, and here is how to use it: ...". A recent example is that the Bucket Fill tool was filling in adjacent pixels that were a slightly different color than the one I clicked on. ChatGPT told me this is called the "threshold" and how to change it to 0 so it only filled exact matches. I would have searched for something like "gimp bucket fill sensitivity" or "gimp bucket fill precision", then had to read through a forum answer or the GIMP documentation to see that term.

phendrenad2 3y ago

Excuses abound. "There are too many features" So? Do the work. Organize them. "GTK doesn't have xxx, doesn't allow yyy, we have to wait until GTK 5 comes out..." No? Just do the work. Add those features to GTK itself or find a workaround. Open-source is built one patch at a time, so a big rewrite can never happen. But what's worse, to me, is that people build up this cognitive dissonance that it's some framework's fault that it doesn't have the right dropdown widget yet.

alpaca128 3y ago
Nobody is stopping you from contributing. A lot of FOSS projects could do a lot of amazing things if they had enough people who "just do the work".
- eviks 3y ago
  That's too simplistic of a view, there are way too many gatekeepers with poor UI design sensibilities which won't just merge your "just done the work to improve UI" contribution, which in turn leads to lower chances getting people to contribute such improvements
  - alpaca128 3y ago
    The linked article talks about a fork created to redesign Gimp's UI, so there were no gatekeepers.
    - eviks 3y ago
      My point was about merging a fork, not creating it.
    - phendrenad2 3y ago
      I didn't see the GIMP project speaking up when Glimpse was accused of being "woke". And also, there's zero chance that the GIMP project would ever switch to the Glimpse codebase. Forking things usually results in the original thing persisting forever out of spite for those who dared to fork it.

wredue 3y ago

I will forever be against weird “hidden” menus and even more against the idiotic replacing of clear, obvious text based menuing with bullshit, stupid, mentally handicapped “just memorize what our developers decided these images mean lol Hurr durr”. Absolutely hate this redesign. The correct response to a “too small viewport” for anyone serious is to buy a better monitor with a larger resolution, not to redesign menus in to bullshit obscurity.

rebuilder 3y ago
A sufficiently complex menu is not really that discoverable, either - you end up having to memorize what category the devs have decided to file a particular function under.
- genman 3y ago
  Gimp menu system is reasonably logical (except perhaps some minor exceptions like having options under edit menu (but this is also problem with most of the programs)).
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- sparkie 3y ago
  Menus used to have at least some consistency across programs. If you knew where an option was in one program, it was usually in the same place in another, or at least similar options were in similar places. The UI designers of the past understood that convention trumps invention. You shouldn't need to "discover" something in 10 different ways when you use 10 different programs. Now everyone wants to "innovate in UI design" and there’s no consistency between the programs you use. It was probably Apple that led the "minimalist UI" trend, but at least Apple have consistency across their applications. The GNOMEs started trying to copy Apple's design cues with Gkt3/GNOME3 but completely missed the mark.
- ozim 3y ago
  My problem with UX discussions as such is that there is no user context. Removing "clear obvious text menu" might make it less friendly for casual users or first time users but makes space for stuff that experienced users have use of. Sufficiently experienced user needs to have menu organized the same way between versions if they use it for years they already and know what they want, probably just use keyboard shortcuts anyway. Discoverable menu items in complex menu IMO is not some holy grail. I think people read too much in "Apple design" and expect everything "should be easy". If you are first time user of CAD or advanced graphics manipulation application you are going to have to put time to find out tools and where they are. For example I like foldable left-hand menu on web apps where if I know the icons meaning I can fold it but for first time use of application I get text+icon.

renewiltord 3y ago

The one thing I can say is that fuzzy search like IntelliJ is a really good interface for experienced workflow. Maybe an AI fuzzy search would help with discoverability.

evbogue 3y ago
I was thinking this would be a good use case for AI. Perhaps you could have a Gimp co-pilot that makes suggestions about what you could do with the image after uploading it to a server somewhere. Then we would know if the AI is more or less intelligent based on whether it can actually figure out how to find that specific blur function within all of the various dropdowns and sub-menus.
- EspressoGPT 3y ago
  Requiring a copilot is a proof for bad UI design.

torstenvl 3y ago

This 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.

kennywinker 3y ago
Meanwhile gimp probably has lower % usage rate than it did 20 years ago. Improvements are needed, and this is just menus in a popup box anyway
- torstenvl 3y ago
  > just menus in a popup box anyway Please don't do this. You know that isn't true. If someone wants menus in a pop up box, you can simply hide the menu bar until the user presses Alt (or F12 depending on your OS's convention). Inventing an entire new weird system for pure novelty while saying "fuck you" to accessibility for disabled people... is just not okay behavior.
  - gaganyaan 3y ago
    How does that inhibit accessibility?
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
ohdannyboy 3y ago
It would not shock me to learn that GIMP has been a multi decade study to find out how bad a UX has to be before the FOSS community starts to care.
- rchaud 3y ago
  UX affordances are different when the price is zero. I learned GIMP the hard way, first because of Photoshop's pricing, and second because Photoshop's UX wasn't that much cleaner when it came to doing anything outside of trivial layer operations.

542458 3y ago

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 help discoverability very much, as users still have to hunt through highly nested menus. Looking at the screenshots here, I don’t think you actually need search to make those menus more manageable. One screenshot of current GIMP shows a menu tree that looks like “filter->render->noise->solid noise…”. I think you could probably combine the entire noise submenu from that tree, and make it instead a segmented control on the actual “noise” dialog that chooses your type of noise. I suspect dropping the “render” level as well would also be good. “Render” is a bit of a jargon-y term in the context of graphics editing, and I don’t think it means much to most people using it. Furthermore, the top “filter” menu isn’t actually all that long, and people generally prefer wide flatter trees to narrower deeper trees. So, I’d pitch for a simpler menu that would just be “filter->noise…”. By flattening and combining, I think that menu could be made much more usable and discoverable.

skrebbel 3y ago
> 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. This is the core point made in the article.
- echelon 3y ago
  How do you support discoverability, sleek work areas with minimal interfaces such as search, and power users at the same time? What does that look like?
  - et1337 3y ago
    Look at the Blender UI. Every command is searchable via F3, available via menus, and sometimes also available via a keyboard shortcut.

KaiserPro 3y ago

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.

layer8 3y ago
GIMP lost me when they switched to flat monochrome icons. Well, I still use the old version.
- Izkata 3y ago
  IIRC a bunch of them didn't even just go monochrome, they removed small hints to what it actually did (like little arrows that showed what the transformation actually was). Switching back to the old icons was also the first thing I did.
- ndiddy 3y ago
  You can change the icons back to the color ones in the settings.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
hurryer 3y ago
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?
- KaiserPro 3y ago
  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 https://github.com/bootchk/resynthesizer

DustinBrett 3y ago

Would be cool if GIMP could move to the web like Photoshop is doing.

gaudystead 3y ago
Just curious... What is your logic behind preferring a web based application?
1aqp 3y ago
NO! It would not be cool. I like programs to work on an off-line computer.
lupusreal 3y ago
[dead]

spandextwins 3y ago

It's open source, fork it and knock yourself out.

Izkata 3y ago

> And the same applies, for example, to moving selections, because in GIMP, you need to press Ctrl+Alt and then drag to move the contents of the selection, which is not how people expect this to work coming from many other applications. Again, the only way they can find this out is by watching a tutorial or reading the user manual. This is a shortcut for Cut+Paste, which I always use anyway because I find it more intuitive.

darklycan51 3y ago

It's better than what currently there is but why does open source software have to have such bad UI? what are those lock and checkboxes? a 5 year old could come up with better icons... What's up with the thick lines around UI elements? it all looks so 2008. It sometimes looks to me like absolutely 0 designers are actually involved in open source, at all

rchaud 3y ago
GIMP is a power user tool, like Photoshop, or Excel, or a Bloomberg terminal. If you don't need all that, Canva or the photo editor on your phone will offer a simpler UI.
- krapp 3y ago
  No "power user" is touching GIMP with a ten foot pole.
  - rchaud 3y ago
    I use GIMP features that the basic apps don't have, therefore I'm a GIMP power user.
prmoustache 3y ago
> a 5 year old could come up with better icons... Apparently none did.
- darklycan51 3y ago
  I think that just shows how terribly non programmer friendly open source development is, designers and the like do not touch places like github, the whole model needs a redo to make it easier for non programmers to participate in open source development
  - prmoustache 3y ago
    That just show how people much prefer yelling at clouds than doing stuff.

rco8786 3y ago

Somewhat tangential but is there any compelling reason to use Gimp over Photopea in 2023?

prokoudine 3y ago
16/32-bit per channel support.
cozzyd 3y ago
Never heard of photopea but doesn't appear to be free software or to run locally.
rchaud 3y ago
Sure: - no ads - no "runs best on Chrome" - no network connectivity dependencies
- Gualdrapo 3y ago
  - No need for an account to unlock all features

tantaman 3y ago

What about an integrated LLM assistant for GIMP? Seems like that's the future for any professional application (e.g., PhotoShop, CAD, Reason)

timbit42 3y ago
Sure. Then we could have a Beowulf Cluster of them.
- tantaman 3y ago
  LLMs on consumer grade hardware are a thing and will become more so. Something that only needs to understand the space of the application is certainly attainable.
  - DonHopkins 3y ago
    Whoosh. That was the sound of you missing a hilarious joke. I guess you weren't around slashdot back then. Fortunately it's 2023, and I have at my disposal an LLM to explain the joke that doesn't necessarily require such an extensive computing setup. User: Explain the joke. ChatGPT: The joke here revolves around a classic internet meme that originated from discussions on Slashdot, an online community similar to Reddit or Hacker News but older and more focused on technology and science. The meme is about creating a "Beowulf Cluster," which refers to a network of computers configured to work together on complex tasks, effectively creating a powerful supercomputer from less powerful individual machines. The original context for this meme was discussions where someone would invariably suggest, often irrelevantly, that a problem could be solved by creating a Beowulf Cluster. It became a running joke to propose a Beowulf Cluster as a solution to virtually any tech-related problem, regardless of whether it made sense or not. In the conversation you're referring to, when "timbit42" mentions a Beowulf Cluster in response to the idea of integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT into applications like GIMP, Photoshop, or CAD, they are likely invoking this meme. The joke is in the overkill of suggesting a massively parallel computing solution (like a Beowulf Cluster) for integrating an LLM into a software application, which is a task that doesn't necessarily require such an extensive computing setup.

eviks 3y ago

Universal search is great, as is the overall command pallette idea, every app should have it Althout the usual menu navigation mechanism should also stick around since it provides consistent invocation of a command with a sequence of keybinds (like File, Open). Fuzzy search doesn't do that since you can match something else. Key combos require too much memorization (though it doesn't have to be the typical horizontal menu at the top, you could have a "modal" navigation mode in the same command pallette) And to answer the question: of course it's possible, just highly unlikely

IshKebab 3y ago

Horizon EDA is really fantastic and the first usable open source EDA tool I've used. (I've not tried LibrePCB yet so that may be ok, but I've tried all the others; they all have awful UX including Kicad. A lot of the commercial tools have insane UX too - look up how you copy & paste in Eagle.) Solvespace is the only usable open source CAD software I've found and I have tried all of them. Unfortunately it has some awkward limitations (no bevels or fillets is probably the biggest). If he can take the excellent Solvespace constraint solver and make something usable that would be amazing!

garaetjjte 3y ago
Solvespace is great but any slightly more complex model and its geometry kernel gives up :(

lofaszvanitt 3y ago

Does this man ever worked with photoshop? What is he talking about? Of course there is a menu, just like in PS. Of course it is overwhelming at first. The biggest reasont most of the UI/UX sucks, because those who create the program never actually use it day by day. So easy. Use your own program and whenever you get frustrated it shows you that you have done something wrong or awkward and it needs adjustment. Another important thing is to drop the "this must look and feel different than photoshop" stance (more vs less) and it will be a-ok. And don't be afraid to borrow things from the bigheaded ones if that works well. Krita and Gimp's biggest issue is that most of the tools are implemented in a non intuitive way. Everything is a disorganized mess. And since PS doesn't run under linux, this gets on my nerves. For example in Krita you can't resize a crop rectangle with the mouse that holds its aspect ratio... WHYYY? And why does the crop tool forgets the previous size values? Little things like these show that the creators NEVER EVER use their own fucking program.

prokoudine 3y ago
> Does this man ever worked with photoshop? What is he talking about? Of course there is a menu, just like in PS. I'm the OP and for the life of me I can't figure out what you are talking about. Seems like you are conflating GIMP and Photoshop and reading the post as if it suggested that either GIMP or Photoshop don't have a menu, which is absurd — there was no such claim. > Another important thing is to drop the "this must look and feel different than photoshop" stance There has never been such a stance in the first place. As far as I can recall (which is about 20 years back), the stance has always been "please explain why your proposed change is good, don't hide behind "because this is how Photoshop does it", it's lazy".
foobiekr 3y ago
I think that’s right. Every time I go look at it I just marvel at how awful it is, like an alien designing photo editing software by looking at some screen shots and feature lists but never editing a single image. Compare with Affinity’s software - they are more consistent than present day Adobe but copied all the good, same as Adobe did with Quantel.
cycomanic 3y ago

refulgentis 3y ago

Just in case author happens to read comments: There's this sudden brick wall of understandability in the "Interaction Hints" section. It's not clear what the visual hints are in the screenshot because there's a number of UI elements present. And "obviously" is carrying too much load, you'd have to be be familiar with Blender to know.

prokoudine 3y ago
Thanks, fixed :)

cycomanic 3y ago

It's somewhat ironic that the author is essentially proposing a blender-like UI for gimp, considering that blenders UI is one of the most maligned UIs out there. For the record I think the blender UI is pretty genius for an extremely complex graphics program and it could also work with gimp. Also the loud shouting around blenders UI have died down a lot in recent years, which I attribute to 2 things: 1. the great work done to make the UI more discoverable. 2. Blender having become almost a standard so there is lots of tutorials and it's now much more often the first 3d graphics program that people get exposed to (hence less it doesn't work like Maya,... complaints).

cyanydeez 3y ago
I got hooked on the 2.78 UI And can't manage to do more than half of what I know blender can do the bitching is mostly the disconnect from version to version.
taneq 3y ago
What does "blender's UI" even mean these days? It's been completely revamped since I last used it, which personally is annoying since I have no idea how to do anything in Blender any more, but objectively is great because the old UI was... challenging... and now it seems to align much better with other professional 3D software.

corkybeta 3y ago

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://github.com/ubuntu-mate/mate-hud https://jamcnaughton.com/2015/10/19/hud-for-xubuntu/#jp-carousel-1364 https://jamcnaughton.com/2015/10/19/hud-for-xubuntu/#jp-caro...

flas9sd 3y ago
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 https://imgur.com/a/5XlgTO3 And the official docs: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Unity/HUD https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Unity/HUD

Jerry2 3y ago

Since moving to 10-bit color, I've had to abandon GIMP because it doesn't support it. It's the only application that's giving me trouble so I've just switched over to Krita for occasional image manipulation.

pmontra 3y ago

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 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 that what you really want is MS Paint from Windows 3.1

7speter 3y ago
Lots of great tutorials on Youtube
Zambyte 3y ago
> At that point you realize that what you really want is MS Paint from Windows 3.1 Or a drawing program like Krita.
- wruza 3y ago
  Or Paint.NET, which does maintain aspect ratio on shift.
  - EspressoGPT 3y ago
    I switched to macOS several years ago and the only thing I still miss from Windows is something like Paint.NET.
    - Zambyte 3y ago
      What's wrong with Krita?
      - johnchristopher 3y ago
        I don't know about the Mac version but I find the Linux version a bit on the slow side and the interface look and feel is a bit off to me but I chalk it up to "that's because I am not used to it and I have decades of light photoshop usage ingrained in my brain". But don't get me wrong. Krita is awesome and it's a better substitution to Photoshop than Gimp is.

thibran 3y ago

How difficult would it be to train an AI with all GIMP documentation and online Q&A's and ship an offline support-chat with GIMP?

ghostly_s 3y ago

The problems with Gimp have nothing to do with not having a sufficient UI paradigm to contain Gimp's oh-so-precious functionality; it's that the project leadership refuses to consider that tue esoteric universally-loathed UI paradigms they came up with might be worse than the prevailing conventions.

prokoudine 3y ago
> the project leadership refuses to consider that tue esoteric universally-loathed UI paradigms they came up with might be worse than the prevailing conventions Do they though? I've been in and around that project for many years and one common scenario that I've seen replaying over and over (and over) again is when people request something and then understand "please elaborate why this UI solution is better" or "can't right now, too many things to work on" response as a flat-out refusal.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

great_psy 3y ago

Slightly off topic, but for anybody looking to make the transition from photoshop to gimp, check out this extension: https://github.com/Diolinux/PhotoGIMP https://github.com/Diolinux/PhotoGIMP It adjusts shortcuts and a bit of the interface to feel a lot more familiar. I’ve been using photoshop for a few years and just transitions to gimp a few months ago, and so far I did not miss any of the photoshop functionality. (I only do personal photography manipulation, no design or any sort of drawing that might need a tablet)

agumonkey 3y ago

Go study Alias Maya, it was a solid timeless ergonomic base. Modo too (it was the equivalent of FP for UIs in 2000s, rare). Photoshop is probably still extremely efficient.

wruza 3y ago

None of modern UIs are built the way I’d like to work with tool apps as an amateur, nonpro, jack of all trades master of none. I only use a small subset of functions. Old programs which had programmable toolbars in 98/2k+ era were the most useful in that regard. I just set these toolbars (and key bindings) up for frequent functions and was fine with it up until when it disappeared. It reappeared in windows start menu, but that’s it. Configurable UIs are obsolete and over, so we have to explore various common denominators. So that new users could still struggle with finding menu items and power users could still struggle with quick access. Because setting up your workspace went out of fashion.

_c3ag 3y ago

NO! 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 binaries exists. but i also think that if you are highly creative, there's so much to-do with simple tools edit: not that Gimp can't do complex stuff but i remember clear sizing the boobs of a woman once at Photoshop and having some trouble on how-to with Gimp at home...

DonHopkins 3y ago
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-blender/6171 https://devtalk.blender.org/t/pie-menu-development-for-blend... Blender Pie Menu Editor: https://blendermarket.com/products/pie-menu-editor https://blendermarket.com/products/pie-menu-editor Gnome-Pie (wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnome-Pie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnome-Pie Gnome-Pie (github): https://schneegans.github.io/gnome-pie https://schneegans.github.io/gnome-pie Gnome-Pie 0.6.1: https://vimeo.com/125339537 https://vimeo.com/125339537 Fly-Pie 7: GNOME Shell 40+ and a new WYSIWYG Menu Editor! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRT3O9-H5Xs 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 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTdfnUDMO9k Follow and support the project on Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/schneegans https://ko-fi.com/schneegans Kando on GitHub: https://github.com/kando-menu/kando 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 https://schneegans.github.io/news/2012/10/10/bachelor-thesis The Trace-Menu: https://vimeo.com/51073078 https://vimeo.com/51073078 The Coral-Menu: https://vimeo.com/51072812 https://vimeo.com/51072812 More of his great stuff: https://schneegans.github.io/ https://schneegans.github.io/ 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 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 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 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://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/rainbow/people/neilw.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(1963_computer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(1963_computer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-7 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-7 David S H Rosenthal: Kids Today Have No Idea: https://blog.dshr.org/2018/11/kids-today-have-no-idea.html https://blog.dshr.org/2018/11/kids-today-have-no-idea.html

b5n 3y ago

Just to contrast the negativity here I'd like to say that GIMP is great software, and I really appreciate all the hard work that has been put into it over the years. It's powerful, easily scriptable, and I'm eternally grateful for everyone's contributions to the project. https://www.gimp.org/docs/ https://www.gimp.org/docs/

EspressoGPT 3y ago
Have you actually been using it?
- smoldesu 3y ago
  I use it regularly, but my use case doesn't really extend beyond compositing images. Works great for me though, my only complaint is the startup time.
  - prokoudine 3y ago
    If the startup time is your complaint, you are probably still on 2.8, that is, before fonts started lazy-loading.
123pie123 3y ago
it is a great tool I've been using for over 3 years and soo many UI features are a pain - the main one for me is using text / fonts, it feels like it's designed to fight you
deleted 3y ago
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nabla9 3y ago

All 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.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
BHSPitMonkey 3y ago
Sounds like you are sort of describing GEGL in the context of GIMP, though it would be difficult to draw that abstraction in a way that makes implementing competing GUIs straightforward or DRY.
thomastjeffery 3y ago
That's true for literally all software. We would be much better off if GUI was a replacement for the shell instead of a replacement for every individual shell utility.
riotnrrd 3y ago
This is what we did at ILM, with our in-house software package Zeno. The lowest level of complete functionality was the "Sg" namespace (short for Scene Graph). Above that lived user-and-SDK-friendly commandline utilities layer (SgCmd) that was used for all scripting. Above that, finally, was the Oz layer -- the graphical UI. Oz actions called SgCmds, but never saw or touched the Sg layer. In theory, Oz was UI toolkit agnostic but, as anyone who's ever done UI work will understand, it rapidly became wedded to the toolkit we used (a heavily customized version of Tk). This made the eventual switching to Qt very, very difficult. So difficult it nearly destroyed the artists' faith in the R&D group. (Extremely late delivery, buggy, and coming at the manpower cost of not doing any improvements on the tool itself for a year and a half.)
- bsder 3y ago
  How did Python scripting work with that? It sounds like Python could only call the SgCmd layer but couldn't redfine anything at the Oz layer. And, how did Python call that SgCmd layer? If instead you wanted Tcl (or Ruby or ...) to call that SgCmd layer, how would that work? Interested in this as I'm very much bumping into problems like this right now.

amelius 3y ago

I think they should focus on incorporating LLMs and stable diffusion and make them more easily accessible.

wafriedemann 3y ago

GIMP was a horrible outdated experience for me >15 years ago and I assume it hasn't gotten any better.

SebastianKra 3y ago

I'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 reinvent drawing applications.

kiney 3y ago
Please no. I very much prefer the multi window UI of gimp, especially with multiple screens
peebeebee 3y ago
Photopea did this, and on web
replete 3y ago
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
- deaddodo 3y ago
  > 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 They used to have a Windows build that was like this called "Gimpshop": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIMPshop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIMPshop
- 3y ago

e12e 3y ago

There's also photoGimp: https://github.com/Diolinux/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.

shaggie76 3y ago

I have a photography side-hustle and I use GIMP occasionally for advanced edits I can't do in my raw developer. In my semi-regular use over the last 3 years I've never found the UI/UX to be a problem but rather find myself coveting features GIMP either doesn't have or doesn't seem to do very well (smart subject masking, context-aware fill, etc). I'm getting what I pay for, so I don't feel I have any right to complain, but as it drifts farther behind the commercial offerings I suspect debates about the UX might not be what GIMP needs.

deleted 3y ago

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DonHopkins 3y ago

>Interaction hints >Another interesting thing here is that when you do something like drawing a line, for example, you get these nice visual hints here, just above the status bar: >Interaction hints >The idea is coming from Blender obviously, and it would make a lot of sense to use this in applications like GIMP and Inkscape. Here is a good reason why. The first place I ever saw this feature was on the Lisp Machine. It was called the "mouse-documentation" line. Operating the Lisp Machine: http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/symbolics/LM-2/Operating_the_Lisp_Machine.pdf http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/symbolics/L... >1.3 The Mouse (pp. 3) >The mouse is a pointing device that can be moved around on a flat surface. These motions are sensed by the Lisp Machine, which usually responds by moving the cursor around on the screen in a corresponding manner. The shape of the cursor varies, depending on context. See chapter 10, page 40. >There are three buttons on the mouse, called Left, Middle and Right. They are used to specify operations to be performed. Typically the user points at something with the mouse and specifies an operatin by clicking the mouse buttons. Rapid double clicks are conventionally distinguished from single clicks. Thus, in any specific context, there are up to sex operations that can be performed with the mouse, invoked by Left, Left Double, Middle, Middle Double, Right, and Right Double. Some of these operations are local to particular programs such as the editor, and some are defined more widely across the system. >Typically operations available by clicking the mouse button are listed at the bottom of the screen. This display changes as you move the mouse around or run different programs. >Sometimes holding a mouse button down continuously for a period of time may also be defined to perform some operation, for example drawing a curve on the screen. This will be indicated by the word "Hold". For example, "Middle Hold" means to click the middle mouse button down and hold it down, releasing it only when the operation is complete. "Left Double Hold"means to click the left mouse button twice, holding it down the second time until the operation is complete. >Occasionally a long click is distinguished from a short one, as a Morse Code dash is distinguished from a dot. In cases it doesn't matter exactly how long the button is held down, as long as it is perceptibly longer than the usual rapid sgtrike. Such a click will be described by the word "Long" as in "Right Long". >The mouse is completely "soft", like the keyboard: The Lisp Machine can be programmed to interpret the mouse in any desired fashion. The protocol that has been chosen, however, is extremely general and should suffice for almost all needs. [...] >2.1 The Geography of the Display [...] >2.1.2 The Who-Line and Run-Lights (pp. 5) [...] >Above the who-line there is a line of mouse-documentation, which is displayed in inverse video to make it easy to move your eyes to it from someplace else on the screen. This line tells you what the buttons on the mouse would do if you clicked them with the mouse where it currently is. If the line is blank, it means the default mouse buttons are in effect; clicking Left will select the window pointed-to, and clicking Right will get you the system menu (these are explained later).

akasakahakada 3y ago

>>> the team tried to solve that with a search Before that you should fix the names. Searching for Gaussian would't give me Gaussian blur because the script for that is in a different name. And if you kill the menu, you are killing the whole project.

prokoudine 3y ago
> Searching for Gaussian would't give me Gaussian blur On the contrary, it's the first item in search results. The very first one.

dither8 3y ago

I don't hate the UI choice made in Dune 3D. But I still think the menu bar approach is the best for complex applications. I don't like the GTK crowd's approach in regards trying to make everything work within the GNOME design paradigm. It doesn't look good on all platforms, and feels more hamfisted then anything else. Sad to see some in the comments criticise GIMP so hard, I get it doesn't compete with professional proprietary software. But it's still a very useful image editing tool, that I use a lot.