Re: [Gimp-gui] About the "floating selection"

[Jehan <jehan girinstud io>]

Hi,

On 12/15/20 9:20 PM, Liam R. E. Quin wrote:
> On Tue, 2020-12-15 at 15:55 +0100, Jehan wrote:
> > Yeah basically we should really make the whole thing more
> > understandable! 🙂
> The use cases for floating selections - live preview of masks, better
> handled with multiple masks; pasting to a channel, where you could
> first create a channel and then paste so maybe we need to improve
> merging two channels - these seem to me fairly advanced uses.
>
> So, what about
> (1) make Paste as New Layer be the default behaviour, maybe even in
> 2.10

I realized recently that some people don't like too much defaults change 
in micro releases, even when these are not breaking defaults (i.e. you 
can still do all you could before).

I would still do it when the next minor/major release is too far away 
and the added benefit is big enough, but here for something as big as 
this floating selection, I don't think it's 2.10 material. ;-)

> (2) add Paste As... New channel (and also add Merge down)

Could I ask people from the list how you use channel by the way? Is it 
just a way to store complex selections or layer masks, for later reuse, 
for everyone?

Are there any hidden usage around?

> (3) retain paste as... floating selection

But is there any advantage of keeping the floating selection, except for 
mask pasting? Can't just "Paste As…" paste as new layer/channel and only 
create the floating selection in the mask case. And only this one case. 
I don't see why we would keep the generic floating selection on layer 
and channel if we all agree it's useless in these cases.

It really like keeping some feature which is totally useless and 
confusing just "because it's there". 😛

(oups after reading the next part, I realized you meant: if we implement 
this for 2.10; but as I said, I don't think we should anywa)

> and for 3.0 remove floating selections? It's an opportunity to break
> the API. Adding multiple masks could follow later; in the most common
> case with only one"hole" in the mask you can get a similar effect to
> "live preview" using the move tool, although it doesn't update while
> you're dragging the mask.

I don't think we should just assume that "multiple masks" would follow 
later. We don't know this unless someone actually implements it (which 
might take years and people will shout at us again for this). Let's just 
keep floating selections, but for this unique case, rename it "floating 
mask" and maybe move the icon to the right (above the mask thumbnail 
instead of the layer thumbnail) to show it relates to the mask.

This would not  be too hard a change and would make the usage 
cleaner/more understandable.

How does that sound?

Jehan

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