Re: [Gimp-gui] Food for thought: the clumsiness of the current layer creation proces

[Jehan <jehan girinstud io>]

Hi,

On 2015-12-15 11:26, Ofnuts wrote:
> There are too many things to tell when creating a new layer and and
> an important one is missing....
>
>  In my experience with Gimp, I haven't got that many use cases:
>
>  - Fill: layer is either transparent, or filled with the background
> color
>  - Size: layer is image sized, or the same size as the current layer
>  - Position (missing in current dialog): layer is at 0,0 (image sized)
> or overlaps current layer
>
>  IMHO: asking for a size in the layer dialog is pointless, because
> usually you cannot tell the size in pixels in advance (and when you
> can you also have a position in mind...). In real life you create an
> image-sized layer and crop it later using its contents as a reference.

I agree I have never created a new layer different from default size. 
And I don't believe I have ever seen anyone using it either.
Thus I indeed wonder how useful this is. This said, unless we manage to 
remove the whole dialog altogether (which is your goal below, I see), 
removing these specific features in this dialog is useless because it 
does not really slow users down (since most of the time, you are good 
with just hitting Enter to keep your defaults, which is very fast).

So I am not sure to be in favor to remove this.
Maybe there are users who really use this and getting rid of it would be 
a bother to them whereas it is not a problem at all to us.

>  If we can skip the dialog then we have shortcuts for instant layer
> creation, especially for the three most used:
>
>         * image-sized filled with background color
>         * image-sized and transparent
>         * copy of the active layer, transparent
>
> You can always fill/crop/name the layer afterwards so no functionality
> is lost.

It is already possible to create a layer of the last type you did by 
shift-clicking the New Layer button, and there is a 
layers-new-last-values action which does this too (which you can assign 
a shortcut to).

I am not sure creating shortcut buttons or actions for 3 specific 
combinations is really a good idea.
My personal preference for instance is mostly "image-sized and 
transparent" (even when I want a background, I usually create my 
transparent layer first in 1 click, then drag'n drop the fg color over 
it and tada! Much faster than going through the New Layer dialog). This 
is like 90% of my needs. So for instance if we were to compare my needs 
to your proposition, we would create 2 new buttons which I would 
consider cluttering the UI for not that big a workflow improvement.

So in the end, I'm not sure if you are not taking particular cases and 
putting them in the UI.

Jehan

>  A penny for your thoughts
>
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