LWN: Comments on "GIMP 2.7.3 adds Single Window Mode (Linux Journal)"

GIMP 2.7.3 adds Single Window Mode (Linux Journal)

nix — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 17:01:18 +0000

A brief look at the GIMP development mailing lists suggests several active participants.

Whether all are developing is another matter: the git commit logs for GIMP master are not terribly active but do show several committers.

GIMP 2.7.3 adds Single Window Mode (Linux Journal)

jospoortvliet — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 15:59:11 +0000

No, it was important, but there is no 'them' anymore - I believe the GIMP team is down to one person...

Workflow-Oriented GUI

Quazatron — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 15:01:16 +0000

I love Gimp. It does everything I need it to do.

I can live with the quirky interface, but I find that most of the time I'm managing its windows. I'm wasting time focusing on the interface instead of the task at hand.

The toolbar is constantly covering the picture I'm working on and the layers window keeps getting hidden by the main window. I suppose it's less of a problem if you have a very large screen.

I'll keep using it, with or without single window mode. It's just that I wish Gimp would manage its own windows.

Workflow-Oriented GUI

anselm — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 10:15:03 +0000

With graphics editors, »intuitive« is generally defined as »intuitive to experienced Photoshop users«.

Workflow-Oriented GUI

Tet — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 17:07:14 +0000

The UI was BAD and unintuitive

The UI hasn't always been great, but one thing it has never been is unintuitive. Were that the case, I wouldn't have been able to sit down with it without reading any documentation and use it productively (something I wasn't able to do with Photoshop FWIW).

Workflow-Oriented GUI

sorpigal — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 11:57:05 +0000

Nonsense, I run dozens of apps apart from the GIMP and have no issues. It's a bit problematic if you're trying to switch between GIMP and non-GIMP windows *on the same desktop*, however, which is why I keep it on its own desktop. No matter what kind of WM you use relegating WM choices to the application is usually a bad idea--which is why the GIMP's approach works well.

Workflow-Oriented GUI

rsidd — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 08:13:17 +0000

I wonder how many people complaining about the Gimp's UI do in fact have several other applications running and/or are using a tiling WM like ion. Perhaps some do, but I think most are used to photoshop on windows/mac.

Workflow-Oriented GUI

thedevil — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 07:04:49 +0000

The Gimp UI works well enough if Gimp is the only app or one or very few apps you're working on, *and* if you use a traditional overlapping window manager. The problems appear when you have many other apps running, and become overwhelming with a tiling window manager like ion.

Workflow-Oriented GUI

dashesy — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 15:00:24 +0000

Gimp is one of the greatest successes in the Open world.
The UI was BAD and unintuitive, not because it did not look like Photoshop but because it did not look like any thing else either!
Sometimes in a rush I could not figure out which X to click to close it! Just think about it, we had to click on the Toolbar to close the application.
I really really appreciate the effort they put on this great tool, and am more than thankful for fixing this ever confusing issue.
Speaking of unintuitive, it is the Gnome3 (copying OSX broken design), that makes it unintuitive, just as an example of how copying proprietary software can sometime be a bad idea.

Workflow-Oriented GUI

mbar — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 11:36:33 +0000

I second that. Fortunately no one forces me to use Photoshop.

Workflow-Oriented GUI

sorpigal — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 11:27:32 +0000

This matches with my experience as well.

My conclusion is that while the GIMP is not perfect by any means, suffering from strange choices in where various functions are placed, what they're called and what options are available, its traditional UI is the best of any image editor anywhere.

In an image editor the thing you ideally want is (1) An image that fills the screen, (2) the tool you need at the moment. The tool you need changes quite often, sometimes several times per minute. Sometimes you want to view two or three or four images side by side and work on them in paralell (GIMP's a bit weak here because it's not always clear that toolboxe changes will affect the image you want to work on). The GIMP's not perfect, but compared to the slow, convoluted UI of Photoshop, it's fantastic.

How about 16bpp and CMYK?

paxillus — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 09:55:35 +0000

Still no sign of adjustment layers, unless I missed it.

Workflow-Oriented GUI

niner — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 09:47:26 +0000

The two or three times I got a Photoshop in my hands I found it very weird and unintuitive and barely usable while with gimp I quickly got what I needed. Ever since they started moving things around to make gimp better match Photoshop, I've had a harder time using it. So for me these clearly are steps backward.

Workflow-Oriented GUI

spaetz — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 07:16:06 +0000

> My point is, Gimp is an application which seems to face similar problems to Blender, namely how to make a lot of complex functionality available in an efficiently-usable fashion. So perhaps it could benefit from a similar UI rethink.

Most criticize Gimp's UI because it does NOT look and behave like Photoshop thus making it unintuitive. It works well for those that take the take to get used to Gimp.

I seriously doubt that you would silence those critics by adopting another effective but weird (ie it is not like Photoshop either) UI.

How about 16bpp and CMYK?

slashdot — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 06:53:56 +0000

Will be available (along with floating point images) in 2026, well ahead of the competition!

How about 16bpp and CMYK?

tajyrink — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 06:47:12 +0000

After a couple of versions after 2.8, unless more developers join the effort. There is a relatively clear path how to proceed to achieve those goals.

See http://wiki.gimp.org/index.php/Roadmap for details. GIMP has really improved _a lot_ on the community and documentation side during the last year or so. I hope they get contributors as well because of this.

Workflow-Oriented GUI

ldo — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 02:02:06 +0000

Has anyone else looked at the interface for Blender 2.5x? I think its really well done. Some may find it forbidding at first, but it can be summed up in one word: workflow. You can very quickly make selections and invoke functions on them. The interface avoids intrusive popup dialogs for settings; instead, it follows an object, action, settings convention where you 1) select an object 2) invoke an action on the object, and then 3) interactively adjust the parameters of the action, and observe their effect in real time in the document view.

My point is, Gimp is an application which seems to face similar problems to Blender, namely how to make a lot of complex functionality available in an efficiently-usable fashion. So perhaps it could benefit from a similar UI rethink.

How about 16bpp and CMYK?

proski — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 00:31:08 +0000

I thought those were the most requested features.

GIMP 2.7.3 adds Single Window Mode (Linux Journal)

lkundrak — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 23:36:00 +0000

It's probably not important enough.

GIMP 2.7.3 adds Single Window Mode (Linux Journal)

slashdot — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 23:13:18 +0000

It only took them 15 years to add this feature: pretty fast, I'd say.

GIMP 2.7.3 adds Single Window Mode (Linux Journal)

mbar — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 19:42:51 +0000

Now only if that 3.0 krnl was written in VB -- the end of the world as we know it was close. Jeeez.