What do I mean by "polish"? "Polish" isn't necessarily a bug or a lack of feature, but it may refer to various behaviors that become a nuisance to users. Usually once a user is aware of the problem, he can find a way around it, but some users may deduce that Krita is simply broken. :\

So, here's a list to get started. Feel free to add your own.

1. Brush behaviors

Default brush setting should come with maximum smoothing.
- The first thing a new user does is drawing something on the canvas with whatever's active. Smooth output = "whoo", unsmooth = "man what a **** program" (sorry but, it's true )

Is snapping still enabled by default for the "draw a path" drawing mode by the way?
- Please have it disabled by default, it's distracting if you're just drawing normal lines.

For "Paint with brushes using dynamic movements", I suggest setting the default "drag" value to 0.50. With this setting, this mode is very useful for drawing super-smooth lines (much more useful than "crazy" lines).

Brush can resize to 0. This means the user often ends up wondering why his brush isn't drawing anymore.
- Impose a minimum diameter. Boud apparently tried to but ran into problems.
- Optional additional feature: make scaling more precise as diameter approaches 0 (switch to logarithmic or other method?), to allow more precise small scaling. I'm not 100% sure how this should behave, so suggestions are welcome.

Shift-drag rescaling only works with freehand mode.
- Ideally it should work in all modes, since you'll want to resize your brush regardless of drawing mode.

Brush resizing should work with more paint engines. It should be usable to control:
- Line width for curve brush
- (not sure about the Dyna brush, since different modes use different settings)
- Grid brush: it should resize "scale" instead of increasing particle sizes (this is debatable though. The idea here is that if you're drawing pixel art, you may want to cover a bigger area, but not change the size of the basic particles. As soon as you shift-drag, the particle size change so you lose your alignments).
- Particle brush: not sure about this one either.

You can't access the "edit brush settings" drop-down with a non-brush tool active.
- This can be confusing, and there's no real reason for this, so the drop-down should be accessible always. I mean, you can access the color selector no matter what the tool, right?

Right-click palette
- It should have a bunch of brushes in it by default so users know what it actually does
- Small edit button on the bottom-right to bring up the palette editor?

Brush modes drop-down:
- Move "favorites" to the top.
- Edit button on the bottom, where you can hide all the other categories for less clutter.

Dynamics:
- For the Distance, Time and Fade curves, the Right side should be labelled "Start" and the left "End" (or something similar), to show that it is being read from right to left.
- Scatter value should be 1.00 by default. 5.00 is too high.

Brush values that could be rescaled:
- Color Smudge Brush: The effects of both Smudge Rate and Color Rate become near invisible for any value of opacity under 0.50. This could be rescaled.
- Particle brush:
- dx/dy sceale: Negative values for dx/dy scale tend to crash Krita, so should be disabled. The usable range for dx/dy scale go from low values such as 0.30 to high values such as 100. To make this less confusing, these values could be presented on a logarithmic scale, with 1 for smooth lines and 5 for turbulent lines.
- Iterations range is between 1 and 400. Is there any reason why it should be allowed to go beyong 100?
- Gravity: The usable range is mostly between 0.900 to 1.000, so this range should be remapped to a more reasonable scale (0 to 10?)
- Dyna brush:
- Initial Width values should be rescaled by a factor of 100: right now 1.5 corresponds to 150 px in diameter, which is a problem when user try to input higher values like 20 and get a 2000 px brush.
- Width range should also be rescaled by a factor of 100 and set between 1 and 10: the "range with visible differences" right now is between 0.01 and 0.10... Beyond 0.10, there is a needlessly strong multiplicative effect on the brush size.
- Hatching brush:
- Current default settings make the lines clump together. Default separation should be increased to 5px.
- There's also a bug (already reported) that causes line thickness to not vary unless "antialiased lines" in "hatching preferences" is checked, so until the bug is fixed, have this option on by default? Actually leave it on by default regardless, people may want antialiased lines by default.

2. Labeling

Shortcuts should be available in tool descriptions to make them easier to find.
- Example: Paint with brushes (B)
- Hovering over Opacity shows "Vary with I and O"
- Hovering over Brush scale shows "Vary with Shift+Drag or [ ] "

More shortcut descriptions could be available in the bottom bar (Inkscape does this too). Example for freehand:
- Shift+Drag to resize, Ctrl for Color Picker mode

Canvas angle field on the bottom next to zoom level
- Clicking could pop up a widget with a sphere with a line (to show angle), and options to readjust etc. (with mouse-over shortcut descriptions)

Layer labels: you currently get warnings when you're trying to draw on invisible, locked or vector layers. Such labels should also be available for:
- Group layers
- Clone layers
- Should there also be something like that when a user starts drawing something outside a selection? Especially when a selection is outside of the visible area, it can be confusing. It can be a " ! Drawing outside active selection, unselect with Ctrl+Shift+A" without interfering with the drawing if you continue your stroke into a selection area.

More visibility for:
- Erase mode: the button could turn red when it's on. I often find myself confused for a while when the brush is not drawing because I forgot to turn off erase mode. This is likely even more confusing for users who aren't aware of what's going on.
- Layer locking and invisibility buttons could be colored too.

Red cross to undo a grid.
- I panicked the first few times I made a grid by accident because I had no idea how to get rid of it. :\

3. Others

"Use image as background" is default when there's something on the clipboard
- This shouldn't be a default behavior. Instead "use image as background" should be an option on the left pane.

Some users seem confused by the transparency grids when erasing the background layer. I'm not sure about this one though.

Other stuff (non-trivial unfortunately):
- All resources should use the same search system as brush presets
- Perspective transform: Ctrl+Alt to move the corners individually instead of flipping whole planes (in the end, the transformation algorithm is the same, it's just an added method to control the visualization box)
- It's too easy to lose symmetry axes right now, but until symmetry templates are implemented (not anytime soon?), I guess we'll have to make do.

That's all I have in mind for now. Please post your minor nuisances too!

Well there are some reasons why reporting bugs is much better in the bugtracker.
Yes it can take a bit longer to file an entry for each separate thing rather than make a block list in the forum, but then it's not easy at all and would take much more time for developpers to track the bugs in both the tracker and in the forum.
Also the fact to have all this in a block makes it hard to discuss it properly, as discussion for every topics needs to be separate to keep things clear.

"Default brush setting should come with maximum smoothing.
- The first thing a new user does is drawing something on the canvas with whatever's active. Smooth output = "whoo", unsmooth = "man what a **** program" (sorry but, it's true )"

Sorry, but from my experience with pro digital painters, it's more like "output as precise/reactive as a real pen"=whoo vs "output with **** vector-like/un-natural smoothing" = what a bad drawing software..

"Is snapping still enabled by default for the "draw a path" drawing mode by the way?
- Please have it disabled by default, it's distracting if you're just drawing normal lines. "

There is already a bug report about that, which makes a duplicate (which you'd have found if you did it the right way in the tracker, at the step searching for similar entries ..)

And these are only the two first.. I won't go through the enire list here, as I said, it's not the right place to that.

Well, I actually would like the list of papercuts on the mailing list, to discuss, before we create a set of bugs out of them, so I'm happy Valerie posted the list here. After all, as is already clear, there's a lot of discussion possible before we can decide whether something is a real papercut.

Animtim wrote:Well there are some reasons why reporting bugs is much better in the bugtracker.

The problem is that I'm not completely sure if everybody agrees. As I said, they're not bugs. Posting them somewhere visible makes it possible for regular users to add in their 2 cents, like what you just did for the smoothing.

That said, if you think they should be in the bug-tracker, feel free to make bug-reports of them for me.

Yes, I agree some of these things need to be discussed.
I just fear that talking about all of this in one topic/email will make it harder. And often there's time for discussion on bugtracker comments to decide what to do.

That said, nice bug listing work!