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Comment by ggregoire | Hacker News Reader

Paint.net is the only app I've been missing on MacOS. I've switched 10 years ago and still haven't find anything as good.

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Several of my kids use Paint.net all the time when making 2d assets for Love2d, and I've used it 15 years before them doing the same thing for FreeBasic.

Paintbrush.app isn't quite on part with Paint.net's features, although there was no technical limitation in Cocoa causing this.

Acorn is more featureful, but trying to be more like a mini-Photoshop than an advanced MSPaint. It's very powerful but it trades off simplicity to get it.

I tried my hand at making my own Paint.net clone for Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) during my first year of learning Cocoa (2008) but it only ended up being a learning opportunity for me and nothing useful came out of it.

Mostly because I had no motivation. I was sharing my progress in #macdev on freenode but there is absolutely no excitement or culture of encouragement in that channel. And for some reason I feed off other people's excitement, it motivates me tremendously and I get 100x productivity boost. But if there's none (and no paycheck), I drop to 1/100 productivity.

Honestly I'd like to try my hand at it again. I've learned a lot in the past 10 years. But I just don't have the time.

My 5-year-old loves painting with Mypaint, if you want something kid-friendly (but also powerful enough to be used by pros): http://mypaint.org/about/

What about Krita? https://krita.org/en/homepage/

krita is much bigger than paint.net though, isn't it? as I understand it, it competes with gimp/photoshop on complexity.

one of the nice things about paint/paint.net is at least partially how limited it is: everything is easy to find, menus are small, actions are limited but quickly understood, etc. It's probably the pinnacle of an 80% product

Have you tried Pinta?

https://pinta-project.com/pintaproject/pinta/

The Linux version has been buggy for me, but the mac version has worked well. I'm hoping it sees some love as it seems to be getting stale. Other mentions are Krita and Gimp. They all seem to have their own issues though.

The Gimp is quite good once you get the hang of the UI. Which may be never :-)

I tried many times, but never got the hang of GIMP's UI. I usually end up googling the operation I want to do, and then following the recipe (and forgetting 5 minutes later, because it is always non-obvious).

Paint.net has always being intuitive, an I still remember how to do most operations, even after years without using it. But never managed to run it reliably on Linux under Wine.

I finally bit the bullet and bought Pixelmator 3. It's an older version, but it was cheap and I'm not using it for anything demanding.

Acorn[1] is excellent, but it's not free. Once or twice a year it's on sale for 50% off. I prefer it to paint.net as Acorn mostly uses the same keyboard shortcuts as PhotoShop. That may or not be useful to you, though.

[1] https://flyingmeat.com/acorn/

On Mac, there's Paintbrush (https://paintbrush.sourceforge.io/), which is similar to original MacPaint and MS Paint. It's not as full-featured as paint.net, though. Other free alternatives include Gimp, Krita. Fire Alpaca, etc.

Ditto but on Linux.

Pinta is pretty decent.

https://pinta-project.com/pintaproject/pinta/

A good example of how far you can get with a pet project created to showcase early .Net Framework.

Pixelmator (Pro), available in the App Store (not in Homebrew)

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