GIMP really needs to go the Blender route and overhaul the UI. As great as it is having an open source "photoshop", the UI was definitely designed by programmers, not artists or photography people. I get stressed out just thinking about using GIMP
Gimp should adopt the design language of its competitors Photoshop and Affinity Photo. Affinity largely looks and acts like a copy of PS when you open it up. That’s a good thing.
There was some people that tried to change the name but it turned out to be a ridiculous amount of work, and the project unfortunately didn't last. (Edit: Source https://glimpse-editor.org/posts/a-project-on-hiatus/)
One problem with those designs is that cramming the entire GIMP's menu into the hamburger menu on top right is likely to cause more problems than it solves.
This stuff sort of works in applications with a limited feature set, such as Akira UX. I don't think it can work well for GIMP.
It's possible to find a hybrid approach, but so far, I've only seen Siril doing that, and I'm not convinced.
I agree that would be bad, I've tried to use apps with giant menus in the hamburger and it doesn't work well. However I think that highlights a underlying problem that is much worse: Giant menus cause problems in general, and GIMP has way too many menu items and way too many nested sub-menus. This will probably be a worse issue if GIMP ever ports to GTK4 since the "cascading" behavior from the old GTK1 menus was removed... And I think this already gets worse in GTK3 because the tear off menus are gone.
The designs are unfinished, but to me the idea was to move most of the functionality from the menubar into more tool options, or into smaller context-specific popup menus. I think if someone was to do a more extensive design review then that would be possible. But it would be a lot of work and changes to put on the users. And likely users would still want the menubar on MacOS where it's required. A good example of a really complex app I've seen that does it right is Blender. Siril is interesting for a GTK app, there is also GNOME Builder.
Well, Blender has quite a lot of nested menus and semi-hidden features. It was, in fact, the first popular free/libre desktop application to gain command search. GIMP followed suit years ago, now there's an avalanche of applications joining in: Olive, Inkscape, Krita (still in a branch, AFAIK), LibreOffice etc.
It's possible to move some of the nested menus into the main window. But as soon as you go anywere near filters, all hell breaks loose :)
I tried to use gimp like a decade ago, or even longer, twelve years maybe. I opened it last year: it was the same ugly unusable mess. Not a competitor to Photoshop, Affinity’s Designer or Photo, Pixelmator of Pixelmator Pro. In other words it looks very same to me after ten years being absent. The UI is just very very very bad.
This comment doesn't have much details and is not really constructive, it would help if you could mention specific things that are bad, and could suggest individual steps to improve them.
I've used casually used Gimp since 1.1 or so (more heavily between 1.2 and 2.0 or so, then falling off), and my totally subjective impression is that the early versions were fun and straightforward, and over time they got more and more complex and feature packed, maybe catering well to some small handful of power users, but constantly grating at the people who only open it every couple months. If I used it more heavily I know I'd learn and not struggle with the same crap every time I open it, but there's just no compelling reason to learn and retain knowledge of a program I don't need to use that frequently anymore. I don't mean to offend, because I value the program and the work that goes into it.
So, I'll open up whatever gimp-2.8 that's installed on my Ubuntu LTS laptop and take some quick notes:
* Gimp opens and an empty, arbitrarily sized window with a menu bar appears. Okay. Either I create a new image or open an existing image. The empty window resizes to fit the image. Good!
* The toolbox window is still missing. I can't draw anything. Dig around in the menu to find it. Is it in dockable dialogs, like the layers window? No, oh, it's right underneath. Open the toolbox.
* I pick the pencil or the airbrush and scribble in the window. The brush is the wrong size. How do I change it?
* "Tool options" versus "Brushes"? Over the years I've grown to dread and loath this "Brushes" dialog. It's full of all kinda of ridiculous crap that it won't even let you delete, and yet for years I, probably doing it wrong, would begrudgingly open this thing, create a new custom brush just so I could change the size and hardness, maybe accidentally click the builtin brushes that it won't let me edit until I find mine again, and after cursing at the janky behavior of the sliders give up and type numeric values in. But if I ever want to stamp an image of a green pepper all over the canvas, Gimp has me covered.
* Should I be using Tool Options instead? Probably! But there's not even a shortcut to open it.
* Oh, maybe I shouldn't be drawing directly on the image, but create a new layer instead. Where's the layers dialog? Every single thing I do in this program involves multiple layers, but none of these dialogs every re-open when I start the program, and I have to dive the menus again. Why?
* Really, why can't this thing remember my window layout when I re-open it?
* Okay, now what happened? I'm trying to draw and it isn't drawing. Oh, the layer selection region thing got messed up. How do I fix this again? Select all? Fail around in the menus a little longer, alternating between Select None, Select All, scribble on the canvas until it works or I realize I'm actually trying to draw on a hidden layer or whatever the problem is. Sigh.
* I'm ready to share my masterpiece. Can I save it? No, I have to export it. I get the technical reasons for that, and that change was made 10+ years ago, and it still never ceases to annoy me.
So, sorry, but this is approximately the experience I relive every time I use the program.
Credit where due though, I explored Krita as an alternative exactly once, and it did such a comically facepalm "Linux on the desktop" thing that I went right back to the Gimp. I open it for the very first time, I'm trying to draw with a mouse, and the cursor is invisible inside the canvas area, so I can not even see where I'm pointing. I had to Google how to fix this in the preference. Microsoft couldn't screw up this badly (sorry, Krita developers).
In case you think I'm impossible to please, Procreate on the iPad (with the Apple Pencil) is an absolute joy to use, and my favorite graphics UIs to use were a related pair of programs, "Cyber Paint" and "Autodesk Animator", which always ran in full screen, hid/unhid the whole UI with the right mouse button, and labeled all the tools and options clearly in text ins...
When I close the program my dialogs get restored so I'm not sure what's happening with yours. You may at least want to update to 2.10, there should be a Flatpak/Snap for it.
As of GIMP 2.99.8 the brushes window is still the same. I think all that is due for a redesign, and the menu bar should probably be gotten rid of completely. But someone who is a skilled designer will have to contribute in order to figure out a replacement. The mockups I put elsewhere in the comments here might be a place for someone to start.
Most of your comments were only possible because you are still using version 2.8 where you apparently never enabled optional (at the time) single-window mode, and also because you previously closed the Tool Options and Layers docks for some reason. Moreover, window layout is preserved across sessions just fine, as long as I can remember myself using GIMP, which is 22 years, plus I never saw a bug report like this before (and I saw LOTS). So it's your local bug.
So basically the vast majority of your problems with GIMP are self-inflicted, there's a local bug that only happens for you, and then there's the save/export separation that is, let's say, debatable.
14 comments
[ 6.7 ms ] story [ 61.1 ms ] threadA general overhaul sounds too inspecific.
Also the name Gimp is really really terrible.
They also made some mockups of what a redesign might look like, but as you might imagine it would also be quite a lot of work to implement it: https://github.com/glimpse-editor/glimpse-nx-design
One problem with those designs is that cramming the entire GIMP's menu into the hamburger menu on top right is likely to cause more problems than it solves.
This stuff sort of works in applications with a limited feature set, such as Akira UX. I don't think it can work well for GIMP.
It's possible to find a hybrid approach, but so far, I've only seen Siril doing that, and I'm not convinced.
The designs are unfinished, but to me the idea was to move most of the functionality from the menubar into more tool options, or into smaller context-specific popup menus. I think if someone was to do a more extensive design review then that would be possible. But it would be a lot of work and changes to put on the users. And likely users would still want the menubar on MacOS where it's required. A good example of a really complex app I've seen that does it right is Blender. Siril is interesting for a GTK app, there is also GNOME Builder.
It's possible to move some of the nested menus into the main window. But as soon as you go anywere near filters, all hell breaks loose :)
So, I'll open up whatever gimp-2.8 that's installed on my Ubuntu LTS laptop and take some quick notes:
* Gimp opens and an empty, arbitrarily sized window with a menu bar appears. Okay. Either I create a new image or open an existing image. The empty window resizes to fit the image. Good!
* The toolbox window is still missing. I can't draw anything. Dig around in the menu to find it. Is it in dockable dialogs, like the layers window? No, oh, it's right underneath. Open the toolbox.
* I pick the pencil or the airbrush and scribble in the window. The brush is the wrong size. How do I change it?
* "Tool options" versus "Brushes"? Over the years I've grown to dread and loath this "Brushes" dialog. It's full of all kinda of ridiculous crap that it won't even let you delete, and yet for years I, probably doing it wrong, would begrudgingly open this thing, create a new custom brush just so I could change the size and hardness, maybe accidentally click the builtin brushes that it won't let me edit until I find mine again, and after cursing at the janky behavior of the sliders give up and type numeric values in. But if I ever want to stamp an image of a green pepper all over the canvas, Gimp has me covered.
* Should I be using Tool Options instead? Probably! But there's not even a shortcut to open it.
* Oh, maybe I shouldn't be drawing directly on the image, but create a new layer instead. Where's the layers dialog? Every single thing I do in this program involves multiple layers, but none of these dialogs every re-open when I start the program, and I have to dive the menus again. Why?
* Really, why can't this thing remember my window layout when I re-open it?
* Okay, now what happened? I'm trying to draw and it isn't drawing. Oh, the layer selection region thing got messed up. How do I fix this again? Select all? Fail around in the menus a little longer, alternating between Select None, Select All, scribble on the canvas until it works or I realize I'm actually trying to draw on a hidden layer or whatever the problem is. Sigh.
* I'm ready to share my masterpiece. Can I save it? No, I have to export it. I get the technical reasons for that, and that change was made 10+ years ago, and it still never ceases to annoy me.
So, sorry, but this is approximately the experience I relive every time I use the program.
Credit where due though, I explored Krita as an alternative exactly once, and it did such a comically facepalm "Linux on the desktop" thing that I went right back to the Gimp. I open it for the very first time, I'm trying to draw with a mouse, and the cursor is invisible inside the canvas area, so I can not even see where I'm pointing. I had to Google how to fix this in the preference. Microsoft couldn't screw up this badly (sorry, Krita developers).
In case you think I'm impossible to please, Procreate on the iPad (with the Apple Pencil) is an absolute joy to use, and my favorite graphics UIs to use were a related pair of programs, "Cyber Paint" and "Autodesk Animator", which always ran in full screen, hid/unhid the whole UI with the right mouse button, and labeled all the tools and options clearly in text ins...
As of GIMP 2.99.8 the brushes window is still the same. I think all that is due for a redesign, and the menu bar should probably be gotten rid of completely. But someone who is a skilled designer will have to contribute in order to figure out a replacement. The mockups I put elsewhere in the comments here might be a place for someone to start.
So basically the vast majority of your problems with GIMP are self-inflicted, there's a local bug that only happens for you, and then there's the save/export separation that is, let's say, debatable.
Nevertheless, thank you for going into details.