Alexandre Prokoudine gmail.com> writes:

Hi,

Recently someone pinged me (again) about a certain inconsistency that I've seen affecting a considerable amount of users: that the Move tool doesn't move contents of selections.

Frankly, I don't understand the logic behind this myself.

I'm just a user but I would love to see this change so that the move tool could move a selection content.
Another related issue though is moving a selection outside (partly or fully) the layer boundary. currently the selection content simply disappears. It would be nice if this somehow enlarged the boundary.

Alexandre wrote:

Recently someone pinged me (again) about a certain inconsistency that I've seen affecting a considerable amount of users: that the Move tool doesn't move contents of selections.

Frankly, I don't understand the logic behind this myself.

Selection tools are for selecting. Move tool is for moving. But we made moving contents of selections part of selection tools for some reason, and we made this as non-obvious as possible.

It looks like we assume that users actually read whatever is displayed in the status bar and do try various combinations of Shift, Alt, and Ctrl to see what happens. Clearly, this isn't working: I've seen users trying the (subjectively) logical way to use a selection tool to select, then switch to the move tool to move, fail, and give up.

What does the usability department think of this? :)

yes, first one gets the basics right:

Selection tools are for selecting. Move tool is for moving.

simple enough and a core convention in GIMP is that that avery operation (move in this case) is masked by the current selection.

that is the basis to start from.

on top of that it makes sense for a tool for intense work like GIMP to build in some power cross-pollination for some straightforward operations:

- so it is right that as an extra power mode the move tool can move the selection (the mask, not the content).

- less logical, but still possible: as an extra power mode the selection tool can move the selected content. (less logical, because a further set of basic operations can be assembled that could get the same rights; e.g. immediately the question comes up why an extra power mode for resize is not there too)

Michael Grosberg wrote:

Another related issue though is moving a selection outside (partly or fully) the layer boundary. currently the selection content simply disappears. It would be nice if this somehow enlarged the boundary.

with the current system of explicit layer boundaries, it is 5050% whether the layer boundary should clip the content or be extended itself (just a competition of use cases).

when we move to system of automatic layer boundaries (something I have encouraged for a long time), aka simply no layer boundaries, then the issue is solved by itself (the canvas size would clip material when exporting, however).

--ps

founder + principal interaction architect man + machine interface works

http://blog.mmiworks.net: on interaction architecture

Hi,

just for the records we also have a bug filed for this: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=664748

Kind regards,

Sven