GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 104631
Allow dynamic resizing of brushes using shortcut keys (or mouse)
Last modified: 2004-12-22 21:47:04 UTC
I have seen this request in a message posted yesterday by Artur Lew in comp.graphics.apps.gimp: Does Gimp support change brush size through keyboard ? ("[" and "]" keys in the Photoshop) When the scalable brushes are working (bug #65030) and are correctly displayed on the screen (bug #32498), we should provide an easy way to change the size of the active brush without breaking the user's workflow. The best solution is probably to use some keyboard shortcuts, similar to "[" and "]" in Photoshop. But we could also think about dynamic resizing using the mouse + some modifier keys, as suggested by Danni Coy.
Changes at the request of Dave Neary on the developer mailing list. I am changing many of the bugzilla reports that have not specified a target milestone to Future milestone. Hope that is acceptable.
Now opacity can be changed with arrows, size could do a similar thing with shift or control (they are near the arrows). That way you could have 1 increments and 25 (or 10 or 20). "[]" have the problem of international users and slower (opactiy range is 0..100 and there is a 10 "jump", brushes that can reach 1000 pix, even with auto repeat, could mean a lot of time). Another idea is to set the increment to have two speeds, to try to cover all uses: If below 100, mod + left and right means 1 changes and mod + up and down 10. If size is above 100, 1 and 25 respec. It can be weird, I know, but it would mean control without penalizing people that work in big images (note that side arrows is always 1, and the speed up is after a notable size has been reached). Ignore this part if too weird.
Scalable brushes would be good, but for the time being, I'm working around that by creating several brushes of different sizes. I need to be changing the brush all the time, so it would be good if it were possible to define "previous brush" and "next brush" shortcuts. Even once the scalable brushes are implemented, there may be cases where a person uses some small set of brushes and changes between them frequently, so these hotkeys would still be useful. When scalable brushes are implemented, I suggest the size changing shortcuts work exponentially, that is each key press increases the brush size by fe. 20%. I imagine it's rarer to require more precise sizing than that, so that could be doable only by using mouse.
What Samuli said about "previous brush" and "next brush" shortcuts. It would speed up my work, and I think would be much simpler to implement than true scalable brushes.
GIMP from CVS does all this (and more). Closing as FIXED.