Hi Roland,

I saw your example but i continue to say that the GIMP can be "uncomfortable" to use.
In your example you don't have all the funcfionnality offer by the program (see
http://docs.gimp.org/en/concepts-beginners.html#gimp-concepts-usage

I saw your concept, and it looks quite nice. Others have suggested similar things in the past, in the line of having the GIMP running in its own window. For some reason, GIMP developers did not like it. It is explained in the link you provide.

Please read through the list archives to find these suggestions; maybe you can come up with a way to convince GIMP developers, since a lot of users have the same feeling as you do.

Alex.

Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2006 19:51:08 -0400 From: "Roland Wild"

I saw your example but i continue to say that the GIMP can be "uncomfortable" to use.
In your example you don't
have all the funcfionnality offer by the program (see http://docs.gimp.org/en/concepts-beginners.html#gimp-concepts-usage ).

1 You don't have on your screen the tool options box and if you want it, it is accessible after several clicks.

Maybe there should be something in the menu bar that opens it on a single click (rather than click/drag/release).

2 When you click on your image window the main toolbox disappear behind. What do you do?

That's a function of your window manager setting. If you use click raise, this will happen. I don't have this problem personally, since I don't use click to raise (click on the title bar or a hotkey are the only ways for me to raise a window).

On Sat, Apr 01, 2006 at 02:01:07AM +0200, Alex Fernandez wrote:

Please read through the list archives to find these suggestions; maybe you can come up with a way to convince GIMP developers, since a lot of users have the same feeling as you do.

what you will probably find in the archives and in bugzilla is something like repetition and the people who are actually working on gimp getting bored and tired of it.

here is the real thing as i see it. no one has a problem with changes to gimp. the very existence of gimpshop is evidence of this.

the gimp developers have their own opinions about gui and layout, but i have seen them listen to people and such for a long while now.

the fact is, they are working on things that are more appealing to them.

here is how to get your desires into gimp. write a patch and attach it to bugzilla and deal with the peer review.

as a user who tried paintshoppro, photoshop and gimp at the same time and opted to use gimp, i ask that you make these changes so that i do not have to work that way. have it set up in the preferences.

another really awesome approach to fixing this problem would be to write a window manager for windows! you would become famous and wellknown in all of the software communities if you could accomplish such a task!

the standards for this window manager that all of the cool free software applications have agreed to use can be found at: http://www.freedesktop.org so if you follow those guidelines, you will be working with us and not against us.

if changing gimp only is what you want, please make your patch so that it can be accessed via preferences so that the faithful users (not like me, i am talking about the silent and perhaps majority) who like gimp the way it is will not be put off or disappointed.

noise is one thing. it is an important thing, but it is not terribly useful. at least not in the freesoftware world. if you were a car and complaining about safety, that is a different type of noise.

i can hear the silence of respect, can you?

back to the patch. make it so that it is manipulated via the preferences and attach the patch to bugzilla and be nice about the peer review. it is easy to work with them!

or, if working with the actual gimp developers is something you abhor or are adverse to, maybe the people who brought you gimpshop are more to your liking.

the thing about freesoftware is that much of it is up to you. it is not like there is only one way to do things.

and, a swift end to yet another noise thread on the list is the very very best thing.

thanks,

carol

Roland Wild wrote:

From: http://linuxmedia.tuxfamily.org/contrib/gimp/index2.html

> Appearance of the layer an channels window ''onmouseover''.

Another solution is that you could just have some special key (to set up in the preferences) to pop up the minimized windows. For example you keep only the main toolbox and the image window above all, the other windows minimized (or in the background), and when you press it shows the tools options and the layers/channels window, in the exact position you left them before minimization, but above the image window. Then you just have to configure your tools or change your working layer, and when you release ctrl, those windows just get back to where they were before (minimized or in the background). Alternatively you could have the key toggle the displaying or not of those windows (instead of having to keep the key pressed, this is more suited for other keys, like the letters).

Ministeyr

Carol Spears writes:
> another really awesome approach to fixing this problem would be to write > a window manager for windows! you would become famous and wellknown in > all of the software communities if you could accomplish such a task!

Hmm, no. Don't mix up things here. The X11 protocol was designed from the start to have well-defined and well-separated special clients called "window managers" that do a specific job and are interchangeable, and there is no *the* standard window manager.

In Windows, however, things are way different. Sure, there are some 3rd-party replacements for the Explorer "shell" (which is what corresponds most closely to the concept of window manager in X11). But I don't think one can seriously consider them more than fringe efforts. (Sure, I am certain they have a bunch of fanatical followers as fringe efforts usually have...)

> the standards for this window manager that all of the cool free software > applications have agreed to use can be found at: > http://www.freedesktop.org so if you follow those guidelines, you will > be working with us and not against us.

Yeah, but the specifications and guidelines on freedesktop.org are explicitly specific to X11. Their relevance for GTK (and GIMP) on Windows is that if they define how things should work on X11, and then if there is a program that exercises some specific window state manipulation functionality on X11, one can then look at that program's behaviour on X11 as a model when implementing the same functionality on GTK/Win32.

Many of the problems related to GIMP window management on Windows are simply because of bugs in GTK on Win32. Fixing these bugs is just a matter of somebody having the time and inspiration to do it, and most importantly, to verify that fixing one thing doesn't break something else...

It would be most welcome to have a set of minimal test programs that would exercise specific window management features that are visible though the platform-independent GTK API, so that one could then hack GTK/Win32 until the programs behaves as close as possible as on X11 (using some popular and hopefully standards-conforming window manager). These test programs would then also form a regression test suite.

To put it a bit bluntly, much of the window state manipulation functionality in GTK has just appeared in the X11 backend, with little specification what it should exactly do, and what function call sequences are expected to work and what aren't necessarily expected to work. (For instance, is it expected to work if a program sets a GTK window decorations before the underlying real GDK window has been realized?) It shouldn't be hard to understand that the Win32 implementation then has been partly just guesswork, which happens to work well with some programs, but not with others.

--tml

Hi,
ministeyr@free.fr (2006-04-01 at 1546.52 +0200):

Roland Wild wrote:

From: http://linuxmedia.tuxfamily.org/contrib/gimp/index2.html

> Appearance of the layer an channels window ''onmouseover''. Another solution is that you could just have some special key (to set up in the preferences) to pop up the minimized windows. For example you

You should try tab key when over an image window... at least it does something here. Control(+shift)+tab do interesting things too.

GSR

tor, so dark in this reply?
On Sat, Apr 01, 2006 at 10:50:17PM +0300, Tor Lillqvist wrote:

Carol Spears writes:
> another really awesome approach to fixing this problem would be to write > a window manager for windows! you would become famous and wellknown in > all of the software communities if you could accomplish such a task!

Hmm, no. Don't mix up things here. The X11 protocol was designed from the start to have well-defined and well-separated special clients called "window managers" that do a specific job and are interchangeable, and there is no *the* standard window manager.

In Windows, however, things are way different. Sure, there are some 3rd-party replacements for the Explorer "shell" (which is what corresponds most closely to the concept of window manager in X11). But I don't think one can seriously consider them more than fringe efforts. (Sure, I am certain they have a bunch of fanatical followers as fringe efforts usually have...)

what about an x11 emulator first then?

something like wine only to run on windows and make it easier to work like you are on x11.

they could call it "whine" even....

it is the same computer underneath all of this stuff. i find it difficult to believe that windows sits on the same hardware so very very tightly that a motivated and intelligent person could not make something work there.

carol

On 4/1/06, Roland Wild wrote:

Alexandre,
In your example you don't have all the funcfionnality offer by the program (see
http://docs.gimp.org/en/concepts-beginners.html#gimp-concepts-usage ).

I actually referred to the first screenshot, on which GIMP has cluttered (to my POV) layout.

Why do I need all the functionality? I've been using GIMP for years and the layout I shown is optimal for me. I can do lots of things pretty fast.

1 You don't have on your screen the tool options box and if you want it, it is accessible after several clicks.

Not true. Just one.

2 When you click on your image window the main toolbox disappear behind. What do you do?

I did that screenshot especially for you. I do most of photo retouching in fullscreen mode and toolboxes do not disappear. Besides I have 1280x800, not 1024x768. I just tried to simulate your display's ratio.

Take time to read and understand what I want to say before answer.

I actually have had read before replying. Just like I have done researching in bugzilla before doing very much like same mockup you suggested :))

Alexandre

GSR - FR wrote :

Another solution is that you could just have some special key (to set up in the preferences) to pop up the minimized windows. For example you

You should try tab key when over an image window... at least it does something here. Control(+shift)+tab do interesting things too.

Thanks, didn't know of that behaviour of the tab key. But still, it is not exactly what i meant. Let's say you organize our desktop like that to keep the most space for drawing:
http://ministeyr.free.fr/images/gimp1.png Then on a simple keypress (let's say, tab), the hidden windows appear all at once, like that:
http://ministeyr.free.fr/images/gimp2.png And on a simple keypress, they disappear once again and you come back to the first screenshot...

The current behaviour of the tab key is not exactly that, it will sometimes make appear the toolbox, then it will select different tools in the toolbox, wich is not really needed (in that configuration, you'll get a tool faster with clicking once than pressing tab many times, or by using the specific tool key). Tab will sometimes make appear the other windows (tools options and such), and sometimes make everything disappear except from the image window. This is not predictable at all. Maybe there could be a simple "Disappear on tab" option to switch on or off for each window, and tab (or another key) would just switch beetween the displaying or not displaying of these windows, all at once.

There is also the option of displaying all of the minimized windows when a specific key is held down, then re-minimizing them when the key is released. It is even more predictable, and easier to implement, since it doesn't need to keep track of wich windows should or should not be shown on key: only those minimized are shown. This is well adapted, i think, because often you don't need for the tools and tools option window for long, just the time to change some brush size or layer to work on.

BTW, sorry for the late answer. The screenshots are low-res on purpose, to save bandwidth.

Ministeyr