Re: [Gimp-user] Close buttons and Single Window mode

[Liam R E Quin <liam holoweb net>]

On Tue, 2013-12-10 at 10:56 -0800, Richard wrote:

> I noticed this recently, too, that in SWM when you hit the Close
> button on the application window it issues a Quit command (Ctrl+Q)
> when previously it issued a Close (Ctrl+W) command.
>
> In some cases this is useful behavior but in others it is not. :(

In particular it's now harder to close the last image without quitting
gimp - you have to remember to use File->close, not click on the [x].

I think of the current SWM as being an experiment with some major flaws.

E.g. you can't have multiple views of the same image displayed at the
same time, a significant loss in functionality especially when doing
colour proofing.

There are some oddities - e.g. after exporting as jpeg, gimp goes back
to the wrong image in the case that your image has layers or
transparency and you enabled image preview in the jpeg export dialogue -
and confusion between close view and close image and close application.

For me the ability to have the toolbox docked to the image is a major
win.

Because I tend to have two or three projects active at the same time,
I'd really like to have two or three separate gimp windows, each with
their own current directory for save/import/export, but running multiple
instances of gimp seems to mean things like the xsane plugin (can only
have one active) and the recent image folder become problematic.

This is all a wordy way of saying I think SWM needs a bit of a rethink,
both in the implementation and in the actual spec. The implementation
was very incomplete but gave us enough practical experience to see some
areas where the spec could be improved upon and made even better :)

Introducing the concept of a Project might be a lot of work, but has the
potential to clear up a lot of save/export confusion too - a project
being a collection of zero or more images, with associated settings,
resources, preferences. But I don't know that's where GIMP wants to
go :-)

In the short term, reverting the change on the close button might be
nice.

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml