[Gimp-developer] Interface: tool icons size and tools preview window usability

[Vincent Cadet <v_cadet yahoo fr>]

Hi again everyone.

At home my screen is about 1-2 metre far from me. It's a 24 inch wide screen and I've setup very large fonts (between 18 and 28 points instead of the usual 10-12) so I can read clearly at a respectable distance. While its fine for reading text, toolbox icons (like in Gimp and MyPaint, for instance) sometimes are an issue for they remain very small, like 22x22. Since my desktop environment is Xfce, I can customize a lot of things so Thunar toolbars, for instance, are bigger (thanks to the font displayed in the address bar, I guess) so it's less of an issue, even with toolbar icons.

Applications, however, which have toolboxes are not affected by the selected font size. This makes their icons very small and hard to read or distinguish. Is there a way to make these icons, say, twice as big without changing the screen DPI?


Another question, still related to size is the preview window when working with interactive filters and tools for instance. My latest example is iWarp. The preview window is rather small when viewed in the distance. For instance I once had to create a texture to simulate fabric.

I used the iWarp tool/displacement to simulate folds by squeezing the texture with iWarp move tool. Since the canvas was something like 2000x3000 the texture grain was rather small... unless I got closer to the screen to see what I was doing.

The next issue is I only had the texture in the preview pane, not the coloured layer, which would have helped me see where to apply some distortion to the texture. Instead I had to distort blindly and see the results after applying iWarp effect, incidentally undoing if the distortion was not applied at the correct location.

Having no visual feed back is annoying. And having a preview window that small increases the difficulty. If the (iWarp but also other filters) preview window could be as large as the canvas that would help. Or if Gimp had some support for applying (any kind of) distortions along a path, that would even compensate.

Are such features planned in Gimp?

Thanks in advance for any suggestion/advice meanwhile.