Good day

I use the Unified Transform tool a lot and it's a great tool but there are some issues with the user interface that I find very challenging.

Firstly that if I click on another layer in the layers list, the transform can be instantly cancelled. When I am doing a transform, it can be multiple layers that I am aligning the new layer over, and I might need to turn a lower order layer off or on to use as the background to the layer being transformed.

Secondly there seems to be too many ways to trigger a transform. There is a button called Transform in the dialog box, which is fine. But there also seems to be an expectation that you should be able to press a key on the keyboard to start the transform operation. And this is not just one key, it seems to be a whole lot of different keys that will trigger it. This is similar to the way that with some tools, such as Crop, the transform will be triggered if you only so much as click outside the crop rectangle accidentally.

That seems to be the default behaviour of Gimp and if it is, I wonder if the person who implemented these features has ever got the understanding that it might be possible to accidentally click in the wrong place or press the wrong key and then have the transform triggered unnecessarily. You may say that this is only a minor inconvenience where a transform only takes seconds to complete and can be undone. That may be true in a lot of cases but I have worked with layers in images where a transform has taken 15, 30 or even 60 minutes to complete, and that's on a 1 year old computer with 32 GB of RAM and a 200 GB SSD based tile cache which is never more than half used.

I couldn't see any way in the preferences to change this "press any key or click anywhere outside the rectangle" behaviour and neither could I see how it is inconvenient to move the mouse over click the specific button to trigger the operation.

BWK (via www.gimpusers.com/forums)