I love the contrast between this and one of the next comments:
>In my honest opinion, GIMP is a horrific piece of software.
Both are absolutely true!
GIMP has been, for many years, the best free graphics software available. At the same time, it's so horribly anti-user (and anti-usability) that if it wasn't free software, the company behind it would have gone bankrupt a long time ago.
"Anti-user' and "anti-usability" are far too harsh. Outdated, yes. A product of 1990s-era UX design, absolutely. But every changelog has some mention of a UX improvement, and actually using the product at version 3.0 is, dare I say, pretty enjoyable once you unlearn things and pretend it's Photoshop 6.0. Single-window mode by default helps a ton.
I have used far worse software from commercial outfits. You would not believe how much aerospace and specialized CAD stuff still uses Motif and doesn't support scroll wheels or extra mouse buttons.
Don't sleep on the command palette (`/`). It's a really useful tool when even if you don't know _where_ things are, you still know what they are called.
GIMP UI was always bad whereas Paintshop Pro (don't if you remember) and later Paint.NET each had a UI that you'd be up and using without thinking twice.
My biggest beef is the UI constantly goes through massive changes at each release. Options moved, mysterious new configs, literally it is as if you're using an entirely new piece of software every few years.
For those of you who daily drive GIMP, well you'll be up to speed quickly. For those of us that use it once a month or so, for a day, it quickly becomes exceptionally annoying.
I'm happy if the UI isn't the best. I frankly don't care what the software looks like, or if the GUI is purdy. I just want it to work, work well, and frankly that menu items don't magically disappear, get merged into other sub-menus, or that now you can suddenly close a tool, and never ever get it back without finding some obscure menu item to re-activate it.
And if you use GIMP frequently, and are about to say "But, that's easy, you just..." then you're not a casual user.
There are more casual users than you think.
(this goes right up there with devs who change config options in files from option= to Option=, and configs= to config=.
I mean, leave it alone. Forever.
"Updated config options to bring them inline with StudlyCaps" or whatever turns my day into a ragefest filled anxiety attack on upgrade.
"Changed all config names to US English from British spelling." What?! OK b112, you now have to deal.
It's funny to hear that, because we get a large number of complaints that we haven't changed GIMP's interface at all from 2.10 to 3.0 and that's why we're "failing".
We try to be respectful of existing users (and again, we get lots of complaints that doing so "holds GIMP back"). If you have some examples of massive changes you've dealt with (and from what version to what version), I'm happy to look into them further.
Please finally implement pie menus, like Blender has had for many years. There have been various pie menu implementations for GTK for decades, and it's always been easy to roll your own if you suffer from NIH so much that you refuse to look at or use anything anyone else has ever done.
I believe GIMP's deep seated NIH syndrome, and refusal to look at or acknowledge anything else, and lack of respect for users' requests and usability itself, are GIMP's actual deep seated problems (which the Blender project so successfully doesn't self-sabotage itself with), and I have no reason to believe it's ever going to change, because it's so deeply baked into the GIMP "culture", if you can call it that.
Photoshop doesn't have pie menus, so if you must, think of pie menus as a way to be even less like Photoshop, if that is what mission drives you instead of usability. But I think your design goals and motivations should focus more on usability and supporting users than simply spiting Photoshop.
But once you finally get tired of spiting Photoshop at the expense of usability, then why don't you finally declare Mission Accomplished, and move on to trying for once to be as good as Blender's user interface and responsiveness to user's needs?
>One example is that Blender embraced the use of pie menus, and Gimp ignored them. The Gimp team is just not open to outside ideas, and gets really annoyed when users of other tools request features from those tools that Gimp refuses to support, and reacts by digging in deeper and clinging to their bad design decisions out of frustration and spite. A really sad culture of NIH and 4Q2.
>In general and with many other things, Gimp could have been so much better and easier to use, but they systematically and spitefully ignored their user's needs and requests about so many things, while Blender did just the opposite, listened to users and improve the user interface and mouse bindings, instead of being stubborn and parochial about it. [...]
>[...] All of these ideas could be applied to Gimp too, of course, but I've found the Blender developers to be much more open to entertaining other people's ideas and contributions about user interface design than the Gimp developers, who have been historically NIH-limited and stubborn (especially about changing the name to something less offensive to the general public). At least Blender already supports pie menus well, and changed the default mouse bindings in response to user demand, and has made huge strides in usability lately. At this point I think it would be much easier to just add a great image editor to Blender, integrated with its video editor, than try to change the minds of the Gimp developers. [...]
Do you happen to have a reference to GTK implementations of pie menus? The challenge we've run into is that newer versions of GTK "streamline" and remove features, so we have to either discard things or build our own replacement (as one example, we've received many complaints about icons no longer appearing in menus in GIMP 3.0, but that was due to the feature being basically removed in GTK3).
We currently have over 13,000 user-requested issues resolved in our issue tracker, so I don't think we're opposed to user requests. :)
I think that's a holdover from an earlier group of developers (there's been a lot of people coming and going in the 30 years that GIMP's been around!). We're also just limited by how fast we can implement certain things due to the number of developers. For instance, I focused on vector layers for GIMP 3.2 - a feature requested by many users! But that meant that I wasn't working on other features requested by other users.
The one saving grace one might find is that a lot of people trying it already had some experience with e.g. Photoshoot and are already influenced by it. And just because Photoshop does it one way doesn't mean it's the way. But honestly, no, it's just bad bad. Thanks for all the hard work for free, but it's just really difficult to use[1]. It would've been better to do less.
[1]gave up on it 10 years ago, so don't know, maybe things changed
I think that the weakness doesn't lie within GIMP itself.
Imagine that you are a car hobbyist. You know your way around a wrench.
But then you step in to an F1 garage or even your local repair shop run by that one guy who inheritted his father's shop in the 50s and has thrown a tool away since the Reagan administration.
It's going to be possible for you to do everything that you know how to do, and even to learn some things along the way, but you're not going to be anywhere near as efficient as you were in your garage where the only tools you have are the ones you regularly use and you know the locations (perhaps roughly) of everything.
The same could be applied across any number of domains. Knowing your way around and ambulance isn't going to go as far as you might think it would in a surgical suite.
Knowing some python isn't going to get your pulls accepted in Canonical, Debian, etc.
Knowing your professors preffered citation methodology isn't going to gaurantee academically succesful searching of The Library of Congress or even the New York Public Library.
etc etc etc
GIMP represents nearly the totality of knowledge relating to image manipulation, and you can lay it out to perfectly match your personal knowledge and workflow, but it simply is not possible to have it automatically laid out to perfectly match everyone's workflow.
Could it be more intuitive? Perhaps, but moving things around now is liable to break the workflows of tens of thousands who have learned to use and love GIMP the way that it currently is.
For instance, having only ever used GIMP as my primary image manipulation tool, I can and do have some of the same complaints against [insert other software] that people routinely level against GIMP. The last time I tried to use Photoshop I spent more time in tutorials and help pages than doing actual image editting because Photoshop is as unfamiliar to me as GIMP is to a Photoshop user.
I wonder what would it take o implement layout compatibilty packs , to allow the user at install to select which layout they are most comfortable with , v2.0 , Photoshop compatible , stable or experimental. All calling into the same base.
Of course such an effort most likeky would need to be a paid effort fulltime rather than volunteerr work.
It always felt sad to me it never reached the usablility/familiarity that Blender has.
So basically, you could download plug-ins, themes, shortcut presets, etc, directly into GIMP. We have a lot of pieces done - we just need someone to focus on it to finish.
I get where you’re coming from but as somebody who has bounced between three different major NLE’s, a lot of these tools are not radically different from each other.
The differences are pretty substantial sometimes don’t get me wrong, but your previous experience usually carries over in more ways than it doesn’t and you’re able to get up and running with like…80% of proficiency you had on your preferred program after a month I’d say.
GIMP isn’t quite that smooth of a transition and you can feel it. I don’t think it’s necessarily a fault or something they should spend resources addressing, but it is noticeable
>In my honest opinion, GIMP is a horrific piece of software.
Both are absolutely true!
GIMP has been, for many years, the best free graphics software available. At the same time, it's so horribly anti-user (and anti-usability) that if it wasn't free software, the company behind it would have gone bankrupt a long time ago.