Re: [Gimp-gui] What is your opinion on on-canvas dialogs?

[Elle Stone <ellestone ninedegreesbelow com>]

On 12/21/2017 07:30 PM, Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:
> Is there anyone who is satisfied with on-canvas GUIs in their present state?

On the whole I don't particularly like the on-canvas GUIs, but I've 
assumed that other people do like them. There is one on-canvas GUI that 
lacks a fairly important bit of information, and another that is several 
steps beyond annoying:

1. The blend tool has an on-canvas GUI, but the angle at which the blend 
is being drawn isn't shown in the on-canvas GUI and also not shown in 
the status bar. This makes it a bit difficult to draw a gradient at a 
given prechosen angle.


2. I wish that the color picker had an option to permanently disable 
having the readout be on-canvas:

  * Its presence in the upper right corner means that to color pick in 
the upper right corner first you have to put the color picker down 
somewhere outside the on-canvas GUI, and then slide the color picker up 
to the point where you want to color pick. But you still can't see where 
you might be color-picking, despite the on-canvas color picker being 
transparent.

  * Its presence in the upper right corner interferes with seeing the 
entire image: Colors influence our perception of neighboring colors, 
which means having a GUI stuck in the corner of the image hampers making 
judgements about the image colors as a whole. Similar concerns obtain 
for judging image composition - the composition is thrown off by the 
presence of an odd rectange in the upper right corner.

  * Removing the on-canvas color picker readout from the upper right 
corner requires clicking on a small icon in the upper right corner of 
the on-canvas GUI, and then you have to move the color picker readout to 
where you wanted in the first place, which for myself is usually *not* 
over the image, and on those rare occasions when it really is convenient 
to have the readout temporarily right over the image, usually it needs 
to be somewhere other than the upper right corner.

  * The behavior isn't consistent. If you detach it from one image and 
then color pick another image without changing tools in the meantime, 
the readout is not attached to the second image's canvas. But if you do 
change tools and then go back and color-pick a second image, the readout 
*is* attached to the second image's canvas, from which it needs to be 
detached again.

Elle