Personally, I struggled somewhat until I’ve found the Search and Run a Command action. It’s bound to / on the keyboard by default I think. Otherwise accessible via Menu > Help > Search and Run a Command.
So if I’m clueless where a certain action is in the menu, I just press /, then type my action as I think it could be named, then try it out. This, together with simply my memory of how to do things, covers 97% of my needs. One time out of 20 or 50 I encounter something that I don’t know, at which point I duckduckgo, and the experience can be much worse.
Would you say this flow sucks? Or actually, it’s fine? It’s up to you to decide that.
Using / is awesome. Even if you know where things are in the menu it’s usually quicker to just type the first few letters and smash enter. I use it all the time.
My way into CAD software was 1. Dealing with DXF editors like QCAD. 2. Trying to tackle parametric CAD, I ran Onshape’s tutorials, they have pretty good technique tutorials, like how to draft a paperclip, that are applicable to most parametric CAD packages. Then learning how FreeCAD’s spreadsheet works.
FreeCAD has a full-on spreadsheet built in, now it’s feature poor compared to Excel or LOCalc but you can store and calculate dimensions there and then use them in the main drawing. Other software has features that accomplish this but it’s not as flexible and familiar as a spreadsheet. FreeCAD has some usability issues but everything else out there is either drawbackware or subscription.
I’ll warn you now it can get a little tedious, because you refer to the data in a spreadsheet like referencing variables in a Python script. In most fields you can type in a dimension, you can click a formula button or hit the = key and then type in a formula. Or you can reference a cell in a spreadsheet. that might look like “=spreadsheet.A4” for the contents of cell A4.
That isn’t very readable and I don’t trust it not to break if you add rows or columns or whatever, so there’s an Alias function. You can give each individual cell a name. Which is slow and tedious. In the Addon Manager you’ll find some macros, one called EasyAlias which, select a cell, click the EasyAlias button, and the cell to the right of your selected cell gets the contents of the selected cell as an alias. In other words, if Column B is a bunch of labels and column C is the actual data, highlighting B2-B17 and clicking the EasyAlias button will automatically alias C2-C17. That feature should be built-in. There’s also a macro for clicking a dimension, clicking a sketch feature, and then semi-automatically applying a dimension. It’s slightly temperamental but it works faster than typing “Dimensions.notch_height” over and over.
Expecting it to be the exact same and working in an expected way are different. Blender used to select with RMB instead of LMB like every other program in existence, is it really the users fault for finding that stupid?
Following expectations and having a “smooth” workflow is something to aim for unless the standard is really bad. No need to fix what ain’t broken
I remember a guy telling me back in 2015 or so that Gimp was designed for having 2 monitors. At first I tought it made no sense but some yers after I got the chance to try and it way more comfortable to put all toollboxes in a separate monitor.
This is true of pretty much all software. So many people expect to be able to pick up LibreOffice office and use it like they use MS office and then get immediately irritated the button doesn’t look exactly the same and give up.
I got irritated by the differences, but I was more irritated by Microslop, so it was the lesser of two irritants. I mostly figured it out eventually. Finding H2 is always at the bottom of the entire style list though for some fucking reason like there’s no excuse for that kind of mild irritation
Y’know what maybe I will. Fuelled by the power of irritation I’ll try and fix it. If anyone’s reading this in a few months and the header tags are in a logical order; you’re welcome
you’re right, but i need people to understand that this is simply not a workable solution for most people. the simple fact is if we want the average person to adopt more open source alternatives, it needs to improve usability even without their help. it’s not really enough to only cater to us power user nerds with “good enough,” and it doesn’t win hearts and minds to handwave complaints and tell people to come back with a patch.
We are talking about software built by, in many cases, volunteers. The only way it will get better, or good enough for the average person, is if those who can help do so. The only real alternative in practice is open source the way IBM, Google, and Oracle do it, and they wouldn’t do that anyway if the volunteers didn’t exist.
Feel free to contribute if interested. It’s not always immediately possible to implement everything, but we do our best as we’re able - recent news posts have included a UX/UI section so we can highlight the work being done and show that we *are* willing to take feedback. :)
Thank you for being responsive, positive, and understanding of the ‘common user’ in this thread. I have seen quite the opposite attitude from other GNOME software contributors.
Again, no, because Affinity is more similar to photoshop.
What exactly, is the “crap” part of gimps UX? I never had an issue with it.
Then again I really liked it when all the elements are not in the same space, it is very similar to high production work using multi monitors and having the actual canvas the focus.
And because it’s consistent. Gimp’s tools are random as all hell. It’s not just different, other tools have been designed by actual designers while Gimp’s community has been shooting them down for years. Leaving a confusing mess where shortcuts and tools have no obvious hierarchy or flow.
It’s cool it works for you but there is a reason everyone is able to learn Blender, Photoshop, Capture1, Resolve, Darktable, Krita, etc and suddenly get enraged at Gimp. I can’t think of any other project that gets this hate constantly. Darktable UI is rough too and the vibes are completely different. The Gimp community is toxic as fuck to criticism and it’ll be a miracle if there is anyone left willing to spend their precious time providing feedback. I’d love to see that change but I think as we see in the comments that many have moved on.
All I can offer you is what I’d consider vibes.
GIMP looks ‘old’. I don’t mind programs looking dated, but I absolutely mind them looking ‘old’ since that, to me, implies a worse experience compared to ‘dated’. It looks like it crawled out of the education software setting intended for mass adoption and only barely did so.
To be more specific, things like proper spacing between UI elements & UI and text spacing go a longer way than I think most FOSS developers that don’t work with UI expect. Everything feels cramped, like it is pressuring me to know what to do; there is a shocking lack of collapsible menu items and visual distinction is very low when parsing things like selected tool settings. Basic features are also somewhat unintuitive; when I go to drag a slider for opacity, for example, as an end user I don’t think that single clicking and dragging will select the actual numerical value of the slider. I expect to have to double click, otherwise I expect the slider to simply do what I want it to when I left click and drag it left or right.
I don’t think anyone reasonable expects to pick up heavily featured photo manipulation software and simply know exactly how to do as they please, but there are some surefire ways GIMP contributors can clean up GIMP’s UI and UX. I mean no ill will by this, because people who contribute to FOSS do so with their free time and money, but I feel like a lot of software developers and highly computer-literate users think ‘good enough to use for everyone I talk to’ means ‘ready for everyone to use’ and this simply is not true. Talk to any ‘normal person’ in a somewhat young* corporate design environment, for example, and they’ll probably scoff at you if you suggest GIMP measures up to anything Affinity or Adobe. Those people are dicks, but their attitude often comes from a place of valuable opinion. It is not keybindings or solid basic features that they feel is missing, it’s… polish, I suppose? ‘Completeness’? I’m unsure of the right word to use but something about GIMP just feels half baked, visually and feeling-wise at least.
As always, it depends what you’re using it for and what your UI expectations are. But for me in particular, some people I’ve worked with, and presumably others, it can definitely “compete”. It does everything I need it to, and my workflow is faster. And I can throw a copy onto any old machine without having to jump through licensing hoops or download a “download manager” or whatever bolt-on shit PS needs these days.
Early on, for me, the killer feature was that it started up about 10x as quickly as PS, so I could start it, work, close it, get on with other work, whereas PS was so drearily slow that I’d leave it running all day rather than wait for it to launch, which meant that I had about half my RAM available for other things. It’s better now, and a lot of that has been obsoleted by faster CPUs and more resources in everyone’s computer, but I still remember how much of a chore it was to use PS.
First thing I always do is set icon scheme to have colors. I don’t know who thought monochrome for the tools was a good idea, but it takes me twice as long to find anything.
which part do you dislike? maybe because it fits my mental model very well, but i find the ui to be very intuitive overall. keyboard shortcuts are also pretty simple…
and there’s some user made config that makes its ui and keybinds work like adobe photoshop if thats what youre used to
Finding things just feels unintuitive. Like I can never find how to do a basic task like cropping. Or resizing a layer, it does shit like grabs the layer under sometimes, ir just resizes the selection box instead of the selection.
Does the UX still suck though?
It’s been perfectly fine for years, could certainly be made easier to visually parse but like… it does the job, it works, it’s fine.
Personally, I struggled somewhat until I’ve found the
Search and Run a Commandaction. It’s bound to/on the keyboard by default I think. Otherwise accessible viaMenu > Help > Search and Run a Command.So if I’m clueless where a certain action is in the menu, I just press
/, then type my action as I think it could be named, then try it out. This, together with simply my memory of how to do things, covers 97% of my needs. One time out of 20 or 50 I encounter something that I don’t know, at which point I duckduckgo, and the experience can be much worse.Would you say this flow sucks? Or actually, it’s fine? It’s up to you to decide that.
Using / is awesome. Even if you know where things are in the menu it’s usually quicker to just type the first few letters and smash enter. I use it all the time.
When did it suck?
I’ve been using it professionally for the last 3 years or so and it’s no worse for UX than Photoshop, the ‘industry standard’.
Both GIMP and photoshop are very sophisticated and technical software (although Photoshop is becoming less so I should add).
People who have want a leaner set of tools should have a look at something like Tux Paint.
Maybe its better. I have used it off and on for like, 20 years or more now. It was crap for a looong time.
Nope. You just made the mistake of learning something else first and expecting other tools to match it
There’s a name for this phenomenon: the Software Imprinting Dilemma.
This is me with all CAD software 😭
I started with FreeCAD. Never changed 😉
My way into CAD software was 1. Dealing with DXF editors like QCAD. 2. Trying to tackle parametric CAD, I ran Onshape’s tutorials, they have pretty good technique tutorials, like how to draft a paperclip, that are applicable to most parametric CAD packages. Then learning how FreeCAD’s spreadsheet works.
FreeCAD has a full-on spreadsheet built in, now it’s feature poor compared to Excel or LOCalc but you can store and calculate dimensions there and then use them in the main drawing. Other software has features that accomplish this but it’s not as flexible and familiar as a spreadsheet. FreeCAD has some usability issues but everything else out there is either drawbackware or subscription.
Something new to learn for me. Didn’t know FreeCAD had that.
I’ll warn you now it can get a little tedious, because you refer to the data in a spreadsheet like referencing variables in a Python script. In most fields you can type in a dimension, you can click a formula button or hit the = key and then type in a formula. Or you can reference a cell in a spreadsheet. that might look like “=spreadsheet.A4” for the contents of cell A4.
That isn’t very readable and I don’t trust it not to break if you add rows or columns or whatever, so there’s an Alias function. You can give each individual cell a name. Which is slow and tedious. In the Addon Manager you’ll find some macros, one called EasyAlias which, select a cell, click the EasyAlias button, and the cell to the right of your selected cell gets the contents of the selected cell as an alias. In other words, if Column B is a bunch of labels and column C is the actual data, highlighting B2-B17 and clicking the EasyAlias button will automatically alias C2-C17. That feature should be built-in. There’s also a macro for clicking a dimension, clicking a sketch feature, and then semi-automatically applying a dimension. It’s slightly temperamental but it works faster than typing “Dimensions.notch_height” over and over.
That’s very helpful, thanks
Expecting it to be the exact same and working in an expected way are different. Blender used to select with RMB instead of LMB like every other program in existence, is it really the users fault for finding that stupid?
Following expectations and having a “smooth” workflow is something to aim for unless the standard is really bad. No need to fix what ain’t broken
I remember a guy telling me back in 2015 or so that Gimp was designed for having 2 monitors. At first I tought it made no sense but some yers after I got the chance to try and it way more comfortable to put all toollboxes in a separate monitor.
That explains a lot of stuff actually
This is true of pretty much all software. So many people expect to be able to pick up LibreOffice office and use it like they use MS office and then get immediately irritated the button doesn’t look exactly the same and give up.
Yeah butlike, I am using Calc, and I use the arrows, and it just, moves the view instead of which cell is selected, which feels really backwards.
I don’t recall that to be normal.
I had to check because that sounded crazy. So maybe your scroll lock key is on? If so Excel does the same thing.
I got irritated by the differences, but I was more irritated by Microslop, so it was the lesser of two irritants. I mostly figured it out eventually. Finding H2 is always at the bottom of the entire style list though for some fucking reason like there’s no excuse for that kind of mild irritation
You could always move it and submit a pull request. That is one of the beauties of open source!
Y’know what maybe I will. Fuelled by the power of irritation I’ll try and fix it. If anyone’s reading this in a few months and the header tags are in a logical order; you’re welcome
you’re right, but i need people to understand that this is simply not a workable solution for most people. the simple fact is if we want the average person to adopt more open source alternatives, it needs to improve usability even without their help. it’s not really enough to only cater to us power user nerds with “good enough,” and it doesn’t win hearts and minds to handwave complaints and tell people to come back with a patch.
We are talking about software built by, in many cases, volunteers. The only way it will get better, or good enough for the average person, is if those who can help do so. The only real alternative in practice is open source the way IBM, Google, and Oracle do it, and they wouldn’t do that anyway if the volunteers didn’t exist.
@atomicbocks @anewfox We actually have a UX site where we ask for user feedback and design suggestions - no coding required! https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/GIMP/Design/gimp-ux/-/work/_items
Feel free to contribute if interested. It’s not always immediately possible to implement everything, but we do our best as we’re able - recent news posts have included a UX/UI section so we can highlight the work being done and show that we *are* willing to take feedback. :)
Thank you for being responsive, positive, and understanding of the ‘common user’ in this thread. I have seen quite the opposite attitude from other GNOME software contributors.
I mean, sort of? I picked up Affinity Photo from Photoshop pretty quick because the UX isn’t crap.
Again, no, because Affinity is more similar to photoshop.
What exactly, is the “crap” part of gimps UX? I never had an issue with it.
Then again I really liked it when all the elements are not in the same space, it is very similar to high production work using multi monitors and having the actual canvas the focus.
And because it’s consistent. Gimp’s tools are random as all hell. It’s not just different, other tools have been designed by actual designers while Gimp’s community has been shooting them down for years. Leaving a confusing mess where shortcuts and tools have no obvious hierarchy or flow.
It’s cool it works for you but there is a reason everyone is able to learn Blender, Photoshop, Capture1, Resolve, Darktable, Krita, etc and suddenly get enraged at Gimp. I can’t think of any other project that gets this hate constantly. Darktable UI is rough too and the vibes are completely different. The Gimp community is toxic as fuck to criticism and it’ll be a miracle if there is anyone left willing to spend their precious time providing feedback. I’d love to see that change but I think as we see in the comments that many have moved on.
All I can offer you is what I’d consider vibes. GIMP looks ‘old’. I don’t mind programs looking dated, but I absolutely mind them looking ‘old’ since that, to me, implies a worse experience compared to ‘dated’. It looks like it crawled out of the education software setting intended for mass adoption and only barely did so.
To be more specific, things like proper spacing between UI elements & UI and text spacing go a longer way than I think most FOSS developers that don’t work with UI expect. Everything feels cramped, like it is pressuring me to know what to do; there is a shocking lack of collapsible menu items and visual distinction is very low when parsing things like selected tool settings. Basic features are also somewhat unintuitive; when I go to drag a slider for opacity, for example, as an end user I don’t think that single clicking and dragging will select the actual numerical value of the slider. I expect to have to double click, otherwise I expect the slider to simply do what I want it to when I left click and drag it left or right.
I don’t think anyone reasonable expects to pick up heavily featured photo manipulation software and simply know exactly how to do as they please, but there are some surefire ways GIMP contributors can clean up GIMP’s UI and UX. I mean no ill will by this, because people who contribute to FOSS do so with their free time and money, but I feel like a lot of software developers and highly computer-literate users think ‘good enough to use for everyone I talk to’ means ‘ready for everyone to use’ and this simply is not true. Talk to any ‘normal person’ in a somewhat young* corporate design environment, for example, and they’ll probably scoff at you if you suggest GIMP measures up to anything Affinity or Adobe. Those people are dicks, but their attitude often comes from a place of valuable opinion. It is not keybindings or solid basic features that they feel is missing, it’s… polish, I suppose? ‘Completeness’? I’m unsure of the right word to use but something about GIMP just feels half baked, visually and feeling-wise at least.
i disagree. i started out on paint shop pro. moved to adobe. and then to affinity.
i have given gimp several chances through the years and it just can’t compete.
As always, it depends what you’re using it for and what your UI expectations are. But for me in particular, some people I’ve worked with, and presumably others, it can definitely “compete”. It does everything I need it to, and my workflow is faster. And I can throw a copy onto any old machine without having to jump through licensing hoops or download a “download manager” or whatever bolt-on shit PS needs these days.
Early on, for me, the killer feature was that it started up about 10x as quickly as PS, so I could start it, work, close it, get on with other work, whereas PS was so drearily slow that I’d leave it running all day rather than wait for it to launch, which meant that I had about half my RAM available for other things. It’s better now, and a lot of that has been obsoleted by faster CPUs and more resources in everyone’s computer, but I still remember how much of a chore it was to use PS.
First thing I always do is set icon scheme to have colors. I don’t know who thought monochrome for the tools was a good idea, but it takes me twice as long to find anything.
which part do you dislike? maybe because it fits my mental model very well, but i find the ui to be very intuitive overall. keyboard shortcuts are also pretty simple…
and there’s some user made config that makes its ui and keybinds work like adobe photoshop if thats what youre used to
Finding things just feels unintuitive. Like I can never find how to do a basic task like cropping. Or resizing a layer, it does shit like grabs the layer under sometimes, ir just resizes the selection box instead of the selection.