[Gimp-user] Redesign "move selection"?

[lofreq <forums gimpusers com>]

> Because click without key modifiers has other uses. Maybe you
> shouldn't be using selections on a bigger layer,  and instead be
> using a text layer for each piece of text.

I write my text by hand using a tablet and template file. Sorry, I didn't
clarify this originally. Anyways, in a large paragraph, you can understand how
that might be like trying to arrange magnetic poetry... but having to go through
the rigamarole in order to move any individual piece.

> The first (and most obvious) alternative is to make this behavior a 
> user configurable option in the GIMP preferences -- like we already 
> have for whether the Move tool should default to picking to moving 
> (I prefer picking).
> A second alternative would be to give the selection tools a sensitivity 
> threshold -- i.e. you must click and drag the cursor a minimum # of 
> screen pixels before the tool will start the drag action.  I wonder if this
> could have solved most of those accidental microadjustments 
> people complained about in GIMP 2.2 without introducing a breaking 
> change....

Obviously, making this adjustable would be ideal. How hard could it be to throw
in a checkbox someplace? And if the functionality was already there in a
previous version, then it wouldn't take too much to bring it back again +
toggle.

> This might work or might be irritating to people who want to move by one pixel.

Arrow keys?

> I very seldom want to move the contents of the selection. I edit a lot 
> of photos, and on a photo that just leaves a ragged white hole behind. 
> In the rare event that I want to move just part of a transparent layer), 
> it's easy, Select->Float (Shift-Ctrl-L).

Floating layers are the bane of my existence. I want to nudge a selection this
way or that for half a second, not commit it to a whole new layer (and then
ctrl+h immediately for every single minute adjustment; and don't get me started
on why that's got to be a different command than merging a normal layer) every
time. When you're moving 20 things around in the span of about 2 minutes, that
gets cumbersome very, very quickly.

-- 
lofreq (via www.gimpusers.com/forums)