No problem there. Probably I should not have reacted myself, I was merely trying to make a point there about choosing some words wisely, because we see all kind of not very cool remarks in bug reports and saying that a help message can be seen as insulting users is one of these. A message can be useless, annoying, badly designed, or whatever like this. But "insulting" was just far fetched.
This said, you also make interesting remarks, so that's all good for me.
If I may suggest, we should work on a complete redesign of the toolbox
and tools' options. The way things are going, we are likely to create
another Frankenstein toolbox.
What we are missing here is cold analysis. A lot of your requests stem
from resizing the toolbox. Frankly, GIMP is probably the only design
software I know of where people resize the toolbox at all. My guess is
that it's because its design sucks. How about we design it right
instead of applying bandaids all around?
Alex
Am I the only person who likes the Toolbox just the way it is?
Yes, I resize the Toolbox from time to time, and I find the ability to resize the Toolbox very handy, depending on whether I want more room for the image, or more room to read the layer names (I end up with large layer stacks, and so I label all the layers to keep track of what layer does what).
I love being able to drop the dialogs that I want into the Toolbox, and the ability to rearrange them as seems convenient for the task at hand.
I've used a lot of different image editing programs, including PhotoShop, and I've never understood all the complaints that GIMP should look more like PhotoShop, because to me it already looks pretty much the same, except I like the GIMP layout better.
I put the Toolbox in a long narrow strip along the left edge of the screen, leaving a large square area for the image. The screen is 1600x1200, and yes, that's not a small screen.
Here's a screenshot showing the left edge of the screen, showing the Toolbox and an image window, in which I free up some vertical real estate by hiding the menu bar: http://ninedegreesbelow.com/bug-reports/gimp29/gimp-toolbox.png
I'm having a difficult time imagining a more efficient layout for Tools than GIMP already has. (I don't mean Single-Window Mode, which seems to me to be completely unuseable, but different strokes for different folks).