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

[Andrew Pullins <android2772 gmail com>]

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.
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.
A penny for your thoughts

This dialog has always aggravated me.  I have always wanted it to go away.  It is rare that I ever want to make a layer that is not transparent and the full length of the image.  In my opinion the action should be the opposite of what it does now. You click the new layer button and it would just create a layer with the same options as you previously did. When the layer is created it gives you the option to name it as though you were to double click the image right away, and if the user does not want to name it clicking anywhere else would just leave the layer name editor.  Shift-Clicking would bring up the Layer options dialog so that users can select new layer options.

For people who do use the same layer options over and over regardless of whether they like transparent, white, four ground, or background, this dialog popping up every single time I want to make the same layer I just made is annoying. 

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).

 

 Thank you so much for this. I have wanted to Ctrl-click the new layer button to do what Shift-Click does for years.  I will be using this every time I make a new layer from now on.

--

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On Tue, Dec 15, 2015 at 5:10 PM, Ofnuts <ofnuts gmx com> wrote:

On 15/12/15 22:39, Jehan wrote:

The more I think about it, the less I think we should make default action for every particular create-a-layer case. Now custom actions are very easy to create in a plugin. If all you need is an action, why don't you simply make yourself a few-line plugin? This is why the plugin system was created: to handle specific use cases.
I myself have made several of these (plugins of a few lines which just add simple actions — which I need — to map to a shortcut) and that fits perfectly my needs.

Our plugin API is far from perfect and it cannot do some things (like updating the default UI); but creating actions, this is no problem.

We can both write plugins, but plenty of users can't, and for them locating a plugin (assuming they even think that a plugin for this could exist....) isn't always easy...

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