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Comment by rasengan | Hacker News Reader

There are actually many different ways you can customize the UI to your liking, including themes among other things. You can also run GIMP in window mode which encapsulates all sub windows into a single app window, just like the other apps you mentioned.

If none of these are your cup of tea, please make a PR - It’s open source. :)

That said, Krita and Blender are very very nice.

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I know it's well-meaning but this is not the issue. It's not about "customization" or singular problems with a simple fix. It's about having a well-ordered, uncluttered, snappy GUI that never gets in the way. As a default. Until the GIMP team realizes that this isn't a separate issue but the central purpose of an image editing program, it will never be a serious option for professional work. They should invest those $100k into hiring a professional UI designer and intensive user testing.

Agreed but it's harder than that. You could get a professional UI designer but their results are not objectively good or bad, they are subjective. The benefit of a larger UI-focussed organisation, e.g. Adobe or Apple, is that you have a large enough team of UI professionals so that work is peer-reviewed and controversial ideas have to be justified. I assume that the Gimp team would be too small to have that kind of group-based UI sign-off?

I'd say a professional UI designer is capable of producing objectively good results. He'd first sit experienced photographers and graphic designers in front of GIMP and identify their biggest gripes with the UI and then would develop a hierarchy of measures to fix them. And test the results.

Honestly, they'd probably have to spin it off into a separate, UI-focused project that starts with minimal features and gradually adds more every time a good UI solution is found. In the order of what real-world users identify as the most needed features.

In other words, I believe what GIMP needs is a partnership with an idealistic professional workplace willing to use it as an experiment and communicate their day to day issues.

I agree with you until the hiring. The work that needs to be done is hard and hiring just one designer will not fix it. Maybe hiring one person to manage that part of the project. They need to pay an agency to do the work. The UX/UI needs major work and a lot of testing. That donation is good but the project will probably need more funding.

I definitely agree about the team size/cost. I have to say, it baffles me how much time programmers are willing to put into open source works but apparently it's impossible to find UI designers who are willing to do the same. I don't think it's a lack of enthusiasm, I think it's probably more of a social/clique thing and open source projects would benefit greatly from opening themselves up to contributers outside the realms of programming, signaling respect for that kind of work.

> I have to say, it baffles me how much time programmers are willing to put into open source works but apparently it's impossible to find UI designers who are willing to do the same.

So you're surprised it's hard to find UI designers willing to work for free? I'd argue the surprising part is that there are programmers that ARE willing to work for free or reduced rates on open source.

Both of these disciplines take time and effort to learn and then perform. The people that do them not only pay these costs, but have their own obligations to themselves and their loved ones they might need to help support. It doesn't surprise me at all that the vast majority of people with these skills choose (or are forced by circumstance) to do something else.

My one or two cents: I have done professional work in GIMP, plenty of it. And certainly, this or that could be better thought through, and more smoothly laid out. But on the whole - and being accustomed over the better part of twenty years - I don't quite see the major problems everyone is on about.

The Photoshop thing, on the other hand, on the rare occasions I am forced to venture there, strikes me as a confusing mess that I'm always happy to leave behind as soon as possible. Plus of course it requires one kind or another of strange proprietary OS in order to function.

I always wonder if all of these "bad UI" complaints translate to "it isn't exactly like Photoshop". I only use the basics in Gimp myself, and I know it has a few quirks that I find easy to work around. I wonder if Photoshop has a pile of quirks that its users are used to find find weird when they aren't there and a different sent of quirks are.

I had no idea. For those people that last successfully used gimp >5 years ago.

Windows > Single Window Mode.

Windows > New Toolbox

Windows > Dockable Dialogs > Tool Options

It is hard to convey how much more comfortable I feel with the program with these tiny settings changes. I wonder how many other people are in the same boat as I.

I spend a lot of time in a grid style interface, so it is great to see:

* View > Show Grid

* View > Snap to Grid

Click once somewhere. Hold shift to draw a point to point line. Hold shift and control to have wider snapping of angles and click again, hold control and shift to get 15 Degree increment angles.

I will use Gimp a lot more now. Previously I was trying to use Pinta, but it would crash regularly on me making it almost unusable.

I agree with omegabravo. I expected Single Window Mode to be pointless but tried it recently, and it's so much better. No more trying to find the dialog that's under the other dialogs; everything is just there. If you're a GIMP user, give it a try.

Nor did I. I've been using gimp a few times a year for 15+ years -- i.e., never enough to build much muscle memory. Your suggestions will make a huge difference for me.

This is the thing that the open source projects whose UIs I've been disappointed by always seem to tout: customization. I think it's great you can customize stuff, but I posit that the vast majority of people just want something that's ready to roll out of the gate. Something that's endlessly customizable isn't necessarily a "pro" to me; if people need to customize something a bunch to make it usable for them, you've built a framework instead of an application.

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