GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 133030
Customizable Toolbar
Last modified: 2009-02-03 15:00:49 UTC
The dynamic hotkeys are great and all, and I love using my keyboard a lot, but face it; in graphics work, you're GOING to have a hand on the mouse, and that makes keyboard shortcuts less efficient. In document processing, web browsing, and gaming, keyboard shortcuts let you avoid fumbling around with your mouse to get your balance (isn't it a @*#$% to grab the mouse from a standing start and take off?), AND paging through menus or going for a button on a toolbar to find what you need. In graphics editing, they only serve to get you a way to skip the menus. Now, since your hand is already on the mouse, you could easily go straight for a toolbar button. But, what do you put on the toolbar? I'll make this easy for you. Don't bother putting anything on the toolbar. Leave it blank. Users have a host of things they can set up in the Gimp toolbox to house their recent images, tools, tool options, color selection, brushes, pallets, layers, paths, EVERYTHING. Gimp's current UI is all about customization, and it quickly becomes evry powerful for any user. What I want to see is a toolbar just below the menu that you so graciously sewed to the image window. A scrollable, hideable toolbar, maybe even one that can be collapsed together into your most used (think about the Windows XP system tray, if you don't click on an icon much, and you get too many icons, it collapses down the tray). That would of course require a new bit of code in GTK+ for the new widget options, but it'd be excessively useful. If the user could design his own toolbar, he'd have everything he needs right at a single click. Me, for instance. I tend to use Threshhold Alpha a lot, esp. threshholding to 127. I could hotwire a button that did a threshhold alpha to 127. Other users might not even USE that feature. They might toss a save/save copy button up there (I would, I use those every time I put down a stroke; though more often it's CTL+S). Gimp is already in its 2.0 prereleases. I expect to see this in the 2.1 development series, if at all. Now, if you WANT to shove it into 2.0 (not with any kinds of GTK+ hacks), you're welcome to do so; but you won't dissappoint anyone if you decide to go for it "later."
The chances of getting this implemented would certainly rise if a patch was attached ;) Setting milestone to future - priority low.
There's this script that Simon wrote years ago ...
I previously filed a bug report wishing for the toolbox to be customizable but this report is cleary different http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=105764 and having the option of toolbars as well would be useful for users less comfortable with the CSDI (Controlled Single Document Interface) of the GIMP and more used to applications like Paint Shop Pro that has loads of toolbars.
*** Bug 139885 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
"I expect to see this in the 2.1 development series, if at all" . . . 2.2 is out. The last development series took years, what gives? You make me look demanding :P
Hi, That was your comment, no? :) The combination of "Severity: enhancement" and "Priority: Low" means that this shows up very low on bug and feature lists. Brix's comment #1 was right on the money - the chances of this being in the GIMP would be vastly improved with a patch. There are lots of features that are more important which are higher priority. Thanks for your report, though. If the bug report is still open, it's because it might be useful. Dave.
*** Bug 168546 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Bug #168546 suggests a DND interface for setting up such a button area.
I'd really like to put a button where the Quickmask one is. Demote the seldom-used Quickmask button please, so that I could configure something useful to go there. Sorry about filing the duplicate. I notice that I'm not the first to do so though. This indicates that the priority is set wrongly; this is not just John Richard Moser's personal bug.
I agree with you about the priority and will raise it -- a customizable toolbar would be a very nice thing. I disagree about the QuickMask button: you may not use it very much, but for many people it is one of the most commonly used controls. Besides, removing it would only free up space for one button, which isn't worth the effort.
I agree with Bill here. The QuickMask button is not worth the effort. On the other hand it would be quite easy to implement a custom toolbar, maybe even as dockable dialog.
*** Bug 429281 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
An alternative to a user customizable toolbar would be a favorites menu: Bug 429331
Created attachment 112325 [details] [review] Gimp Toolbar Patch This patch adds toolbar support into Gimp, it is not yet configurable via GUI, but only via menu/image-toolbar.xml.
Thanks for the patch! It looks clean and straightforward. We should consider adding this functionality to GIMP 2.6.
I don't think we want this functionality and vote for closing as WONTFIX. We are definitely not going to do such a user interface change for 2.6 and definitely not without prior review from the UI team.
I agree that this shouldn't be attempted for 2.6, but I feel that Gimp is going to need toolbars of some sort pretty soon -- in particular, I can't imagine how on-canvas text editing could be done effectively without a toolbar. That would be a tool-specific toolbar, not a custom toolbar, but once the door to toolbars has been opened, there will need to be a general plan on how to deal with them.
Tool-specific toolbars are somewhat unrelated to this bug-report and they should most probably be implemented as a floating toolbox that is drawn on the canvas. If this needs further discussion, I suggest that we have it on the mailing-list.
The UI team has now taken a look at this and concluded that a toolbar does not fit the planned UI of GIMP [1] so I am closing this as WONTFIX. Ingo, I am sorry that this bug report was not closed earlier so that the damage could be minimized. Even though your patch was not accepted it was of good quality and I look forward to any future patches you might write. Best regards, Martin Nordholts [1] http://lists.xcf.berkeley.edu/lists/gimp-developer/2008-June/020372.html
I would like to see some further discussion on this please. The discussion went on on IRC after this mail and it seems some toolbar-like thing could be very useful to tablet users (maybe not like this, but this needs to be determined) Reopening, we can still close it again.
It is a underlying general design principle for me to make GIMP's UI more hands-on, relying less on scurrying through menus. This will also contribute towards the goal of supporting tablet users without relying on keyboard shortcuts. and yes, reflecting comments 17 and 18, one way to achieve that is to put more tool controls at certain moments on-canvas. but to imaging these ass toolbars is assuming too much. But introducing a christmas-colorful toolbar at the top of image windows is not the way to achieve that. For the problems we are trying to solve, it is not even a decent solution. And just at the moment we are taking the first steps to take visual noise out of GIMP's interface, too let users concentrate on the image, this thing pops up. the arguments about easier to learn or make GIMP more like other apps are completely bogus on a UI concept level. let's put effort into something else...
We should accept the advice from Peter. Closing as WONTFIX.