Suppose I'm doing a website design sketch, and I've got 3 layers that I've used to create a sidebar in the drawing: a drawing of the sidebar itself, a text layer with info about the sidebar, and an arrow pointing from the text to the sidebar.

These three layers are frequently being moved around, colorized, or otherwise manipulated as a unit. Currently, each time that I want to manipulate them as a unit, I go to the "Layers" dialog and click the "chain-link" icon next to each of them, and then perform an action on them as a set.

What I propose is that Gimp enables users to save these sets of layers -- that is, I'd like to be able to save a particular set of layers that I regularly work with as a group into a "set" that I can select whenever I want to perform a manipulation on all of its members, rather than having to repeatedly select each of the individual layers each time I want to work on them all. 

For example, since the three layers mentioned in the example above form a "Sidebar object", I'd like to be able to create an object in the "Layers" dialog called "Sidebar" that contains each of the above three layers that I can select whenever I want to work with those objects (I might also create "Branding" and "Footer" sets, for example).

As far as what the interface might look like, I would suggest that an extra list region (similar to the one that currently lists the layers) is added to the layers dialog called "Sets" (that is, the layers dialog would be split into two lists: "Layers" and "Sets"). To create a new Set, I would click the chain-link icons for all of the layers that I want in the Set, and then click something (e.g. a button or context menu option) that says "Add linked layers to set". This would pop up a dialog asking me to name the set, and then when I click "Save set" it would add it to the list of sets. From then on, whenever I want to perform a manipulation on all three layers, I simply click on "Sidebar" in the "Sets" list, and it acts exactly as if I had clicked the "chain-link" icon for all three of the member layers.

Is this not useful, for some reason, or is there already a better way to do this (i.e. to group related layers into re-usable sets)? 

If not, are there any experienced Gimp developers who might be willing to write a patch? 

If nobody is interested in writing a patch, but people think it is a good idea to implement, I would be willing to attempt to write the patch, assuming that some more experienced Gimp developers wouldn't mind answering a few questions here and there about the Gimp sources.

Thanks,
Jesse Taylor