Single Window Mode [LWN.net]

Single Window Mode

Posted Nov 10, 2011 3:55 UTC (Thu) by tshow (subscriber, #6411)
Parent article: A preview of GIMP 2.8

I'm looking forward to having single window mode. Reasons:

1) I occasionally have to use gimp on OSX, which has an absolutely broken focus model. Click-to-focus means that if you want to (for instance) select the crop tool and then use it, you have to click on the tool palette to give it focus, then click on the crop tool, then click on the image to give it focus, then click on it again to start cropping. If you forget the second click on the tool palette you appear to have done something but you keep whatever tool was last selected. It's survivable, obviously, but it's like trying to do surgery with mittens on and a little yappy dog in the room.

2) I also occasionally have to use gimp with a very large number of images, and managing all those individual windows can get troublesome. I once (on a windows machine, admittedly) accidentally hit "enter" in explorer with in excess of 3000 images selected. It took nearly an hour to get back enough control to reboot the machine cleanly. Linux doesn't fare anywhere near that badly, but it can still stumble with large numbers of files.

Multiwindow gimp mostly works great when you have sloppy floating focus and a robust window manager. Unfortunately, on some OSs I'm forced to use from time to time, those aren't a given.

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Single Window Mode

Posted Nov 10, 2011 16:31 UTC (Thu) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link]

> Click-to-focus means that if you want to (for instance) select the crop tool and then use it, you have to click on the tool palette to give it focus, then click on the crop tool, then click on the image to give it focus, then click on it again to start cropping.

That's not true of all click-to-focus arrangements. In most window managers I've used, there is a configuration setting which controls whether the initial click to focus the window is also passed on to the application, in which case you don't need to select the tool palette and image window separately, just click on the tool and then perform the crop. Normally this is enabled by default.

Single Window Mode

Posted Nov 14, 2011 17:55 UTC (Mon) by rmano (subscriber, #49886) [Link]

...it's also useful if you have under your hand the "nice" global menu non-optional thing (unity anyone?), and you have to use it because gnome shell is broken with your 3D accelerated drivers. Sigh. (Well, you can switch to KDE, I suppose).

Single Window Mode

Posted Nov 15, 2011 3:06 UTC (Tue) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]

> 1) I occasionally have to use gimp on OSX, which has an absolutely broken focus model. Click-to-focus means that if you want to (for instance) select the crop tool and then use it, you have to click on the tool palette to give it focus, then click on the crop tool, then click on the image to give it focus, then click on it again to start cropping.

Of course that isn't an actual feature/brokenness of MacOS. Ever since near the very beginning, there's been a concept of a "tool palette" which floats on top of other windows, doesn't accept focus, and accepts clicks even when not focused. Photoshop's tool palette certainly used to work like that many many years ago. (I haven't used it in a decade or so; not sure how it works now). For a built-in example in OSX, look at the standard font window.

Maybe *GIMP* on OSX is broken in this way (don't know; don't use it either), but you can't really blame OSX's focus model for GIMP being a terrible port.

Single Window Mode

Posted May 7, 2012 16:11 UTC (Mon) by dlazaro (subscriber, #38702) [Link]

You can change the click-through behavior in the X11 app by opening the X11 preferences (X11 > Preferences) and enabling the Click-through Inactive Windows option in the Windows tab.

That is current as of OS X Lion. If I remember correctly, previous versions had a defaults preference activated through the command line that was described in the Xquartz(1) man page.