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

[Akkana Peck <akkana shallowsky com>]

Alexandre Prokoudine writes:
[lots of sensible stuff]

> Frankly, the rotation dialog before 2.9 was PITA. I'll speak for
> myself, but every time I switched to that tool and clicked the
> drawable, the first thing I did was moving the bloody dialog away so
> that I could see my image. The dialog was getting in the way of

Yes, that's true. I don't think anyone liked the popup dialogs.
But the on-canvas dialogs, as you say, have a lot of the same problems.

> That leaves us Angle, Origin X, Origin Y and maybe a small reset
> button for the origin. Fits the rest of Settings dialog nicely.
>
> What I _would_ add to the canvas is a small on-screen display item
> that would follow the mouse pointer at an offset and display current
> angle as long as you drag and disappear as soon as you stop. That way
> you know the current angle exactly _and_ you don't have to change your
> point of eye focus _and_ you can evaluate the result without visual
> obstacles (just stop dragging).

That would be terrific. The three numbers that matter for rotate
(and similarly for the other transform tools, except Unified)
are easier to show than the numbers GIMP shows already for Crop,
Rect Select and Ellipse Select, and the Tool Options work fine
for those tools. Having a little additional feedback on the angle
via a number near the mouse would be quite handy, and unobtrusive.

[On the Text tool:]
> There can be 3 (THREE) simultaneously available text setting areas on
> display: on-canvas toolbar, text editor dialog, and settings in the
> sidebar. All three have a feature overlap. Isn't that a little crazy?

Worse, although they overlap in features, the features behave
differently. For instance, the controls in the on-canvas dialog
don't do anything unless you first select all the text (which makes
the dialog's display look more cluttered and makes it even harder to
see what's underneath), while the Tool Options controls work without
needing a selection.

The Text tool dialog also differs from the other on-canvas dialogs
in not having detach/dismiss buttons.

        ...Akkana