Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by samcheng | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

samcheng

As a casual user on a Mac, I've long since abandoned GIMP for Pixelmator + Imagemagick.

Has GIMP improved in usability in the past few years?

View on HN

Pixelmator is great, but it misses extremely useful feature: move canvas view ouside the border.

Feature request filled back in 2012 and still not implemented: http://support.pixelmator.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=8336

Without it working in areas near the edges is very stressful and painful.

The worst part is that it used to allow panning outside the canvas. At some point, they broke it in fullscreen (or non-fullscreen, I don't remember). Then they broke it in the other mode. They also removed the option to hide all windows with the tab key, which was extremely useful when working on a small screen. And they also moved all their color filters into another large window you have to open, obscuring your canvas. It's clear that they develop this app on a massive screen, and give no thoughts to the people who might want to use it on a 13'' MacBook.

I recently installed a fresh version of GIMP (for the purpose of running the exporter script so I can import the layers from photoshop files into the Spine animation tool). I'm only using it as an elaborate runtime for that script, but my impressions are that the UI is basically the same as I remember it from 15 years ago. So, while it's features may have improved, the UI does not seem like it's improved at all.

> the UI does not seem like it's improved at all.

I've always disliked the large widgets (very tall buttons, sliders, etc.). Every now and then I look at some screenshots from the newest GIMP version and there's no indication they're going to change.

You could use a compact Gtk theme to get round this.

But make sure that they don't make sliders too small - you'll lose the ability to do either fine relative or coarse absolute adjustments by dragging their lower or upper half.

Single-window mode is a big improvement. At least for me, I know some prefer the floating mode.

> So, while it's features may have improved, the UI does not seem like it's improved at all.

That's actually a bonus point in my book. If it ain't broke don't fix it. I like that when I start Gimp anywhere I can just start using it. I am not a designer though.

Many people would argue that it is broken and needs fixing ;-)

I used to love GIMP and didn't have any huge problems with it (although, at the time, I liked the multi window layout because I was using a tiling window manager), but then I tried photoshop and the photoshop UI was simply much easier for me to navigate. Now I use GIMP only because its free.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com