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

[Jehan <jehan girinstud io>]

P.S.:

On 2018-01-10 20:30, Jehan wrote:
> Hi!
>
> Thanks to everyone who participated on this discussion (here, and on
> IRC as well).
> I think the conclusion is that we don't like current on-canvas
> dialogs, but popup dialogs were quite bad too. ;-)
>
> Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:
> > And above all, it kinda sucks that we are having this conversation
> > right when 2.10 is looming upon us. Sorry about that.
>
> On short term (2.10), it seems clear that the on-canvas dialogs will
> likely stay as-is. Sorry Alexandre for any misunderstanding, my goal
> was obviously not to make any change in 2.10 on how they work (I have
> pushed for feature freeze for long enough myself as well! :p). My
> question was more for mid or long term changes.
> The only change I considered short term was maybe disabling some of
> the on-canvas dialogs, especially because we (still to this day) have
> some ugly crash with them and had some pretty serious usability bugs
> too (but these are fixed in-between!).
>
> As a statement, I want to say that I personally consider that many of
> the discussion which happen on this list are not meant for short term
> by nature (especially when sometimes we are discussing changing deeper
> GUI logics).
>
> On mid-term, I think the main issue that everybody is raising is
> mostly that the on-canvas GUIs are not repositionnable. They should
> be. Also I think they should be hidable and unhidable (you can
> currently "hide" them by clicking the top-right cross but this
> actually cancels any operation in progress, so that's not it). We need
> to be able to hide/show the on-canvas dialog while still seeing a
> preview (to see it fully with nothing in the way, but also to not
> influence the color perception as Elle notes).
>
> Also Alexandre notes:
> > 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.
>
> Elle also says the same thing:
> > 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
>
> So that's definitely true that the popup dialogs are by default just
> as annoying as the on-canvas ones since we popup them above the image!
> If not mistaken, we now we have some positionning saving code which we
> didn't have back in older versions and most popup dialogs' position in
> current GIMP is currently remembered and reused. We just need to
> remember the position of the popped-up tool dialogs as well and always
> put it here when popping a new one up. So this is not a problem.

I just realized that this is already the case. As I said, we now 
remember a bunch of dialog position, and it seems that this includes 
these popup tool dialogs. Even accross sessions. :-)

So this worry of both Alexandre and Elle is no more (as well as my point 
(5) below). You won't have to move the dialog again every time you use a 
tool. It will just go to the last position you put it. Just make the 
test youself with master code. :-)

Jehan

> Finally Akkana notes:
> > The Text tool dialog also differs from the other on-canvas dialogs
> > in not having detach/dismiss buttons.
>
> And Elle:
> > 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.
>
> Basically yes, I think the choice to have on-canvas or popup dialogs
> should stick, which means we should definitely be able to re-attach
> popped-up dialogs.
>
> So I see a few TODOs:
> (1) easily repositionnable on-canvas dialogs
> (2) hidable/showable on-canvas dialogs
> (3) same as on-canvas dialog can be detached, popup dialog should be
> re-attachable
> (4) choice of on-canvas or popup dialogs should stick
> (5) popup dialogs position should be remembered
>
> I guess that's the way to go for now which does not disrupt too much,
> yet would already improve things quite a bit. We can still think of
> better future and there were a bunch of ideas in the discussion which
> are not included right now, but may be some day. :-)
>
> Jehan

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