Whenever I do paintings, I frequently work in canvas only mode and only use shortcuts. I personally find UI elements to be distracting when doing art, so I try to minimize it as much as possible. I made a very simple change, but I think it is very powerful one that would be nice to implement. Take a look...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSFIb7S ... e=youtu.be

I took a normal tool that already exists, but used it differently than its name implies. Can you guess what is is?

Of course it is nothing short of the fantastic crop tool! This tool has a very misleading name, which is why I think some people don't realize it can grow the canvas as well as shrink it. All I did in the code was assign the crop tool to the "C" key since that seems to be the default in a lot of programs - and most comfortable for me. The "common colors" shortcut I moved to "U" (I actually still don't know how that works).

For the re-sizing part, you can actually just click the canvas and it will auto-fill the selection to the entire canvas. I actually think it should work that way by default. I really think you don't need to draw a rectangle at the beginning - and then adjust it. Of course the tool would still be able to do everything it currently does. The point is just changing the default functionality and creating a shortcut to make it more useful.

the pseudo-infinite canvas idea was trying to solve this problem, but I thought it doesn't give the control that most artists need.

thoughts?

I do this too!! It's very convenient. :D But I think the current method is alright with me. What do you mean by the resizing part by default? Like it should extend the canvas automatically when you go past the boundary? It could be cumbersome if that's not the intention of the user though.

I like the shortcut suggestion though! The common colors shortcut is kind of just like an extra palette for colors. It would be nice if you can do that with a custom palette. Hmm.

I agree with the shortcut change -- and also with making the crop tool select the whole image by default _if_ there's no selection present -- if there's a selection that should be the starting size of the crop rect.

As for making the grow option by default, I actually think that we need to do something else here, and that's make the tools all remember their settings betweens sessions. That used to be there in the pre 1.3 days, and it wouldn't be too hard to implement it again. In fact, I started on that, but then got distracted. If the tool remembers the settings, people can have grow on or off whichever they prefer.

ok. Maybe for now, I can add a commit to add the shortcut for cropping and switch the common colors. I can look into saving settings for the crop tool (I guess saved in the kritarc file).

Yes. Saving the settings should indeed happen in the kritarc file, it's pretty simple. But to do it right, it has to be implemented in all tools otherwise people will get confused.

I agree we would want to do it everywhere. If we would add saved settings to all tools that would also mean any new features new would also need to have their settings added. Otherwise we would get out of sync. It seems important, but I think it would take quite a while to do with every setting. That time might be better spent on other tasks.