@boudewijn - Could you expand on why you dislike that solution? What type of solution are you thinking of? I am not familiar with other solutions that would be familiar to most people.

The reason that I like it doesn't have to do with how it looks visually, but how it works with shortcuts in most programs. For example, pressing 'B' would go to the brush icon. Then pressing shift +B will cycle through the different brush icon tools in the flyout. That is the paradigm that I am use to. I could be easily swayed if there is something better for novices and experts.

I just know that area has a lot of icons on it right now.

scottpetrovic wrote:I just know that area has a lot of icons on it right now.

Maybe allow user to customize which icons to show?

I personally replaced the toolbox docker with an extra toolbar so I could customize that toolbar with the tools I actually want to use. It was a bit tedious to do though (add each tool and select icons for them, one by one).

The application needs to be fully functional when it loads. Having to configure a program's UI before you can access all tools is the opposite of an 'easy to use' program.

People want a program that is powerful and easy to learn. They are conflicting statements, but that is the challenge that we have to solve for.

I am sure the tool flyout solution it isn't the best solution, but it *is* a solution. It is also a known paradigm, so it isn't something you have to teach people. People that have used any art programs before will just 'get it'. This 'get it' aspect is very important if we want people to say Krita is easy to use. UI is not about being creative. UI is about clear communication.

I am not set in the flyout solution. I just think whatever the solution is needs to solve these problems.
1. reduce space on the left toolbar
2. easy and fast access of all tools for novices and experts

I can think a little more about it.

Personally I only use maybe 2-4 items in the toolbox. the only reason I use the fill tool fromthe toolbox is that it ddoesn't keep my keyboard setting for it.. I think we could removethe vector only tools when wwe're on a paint layer to save space. I can't check cause I'm on mobile at the moment but when I was new to krita I was confused when the entire top part of the toolbar was vector tools. Or was I misremembering?

scottpetrovic wrote:@boudewijn - Could you expand on why you dislike that solution? What type of solution are you thinking of? I am not familiar with other solutions that would be familiar to most people.

Well, I guess it's mostly that Photoshop remembers which tool was last swapped out in a certain set. It confused me like nothing else when it was introduced, I guess in Photoshop 6 or 7 because I no longer could find simple things, and I had to click on every dot-decorated icon to see what was underneath.

It's one reason I wanted to keep as few tools as possible, so all the tools would always be visible, and muscle memory would always work.

Another idea is to revisit the existing tool icons and see if they need to be moved somewhere (or maybe even removed). Maybe creating more dockers for less used tools instead of tools on the icon. I know with the drawing aids and grid tools have odd interactions when you use them currently on the left toolbar.

For example, the grid tool icon just moves the grid when you click it. It is kind of odd, because it won't turn the tool on if it is off. When you click it, you also don't get any options for spacing and such. Those are currently in the preferences. We might need to rethink that workflow.

There is also an edit perspective grid tool that is very related to the ruler assistant editor tool. The ruler assistant editor tool is much more than rulers now as well. Cleaning up the existing tools might be a better first step.

scottpetrovic wrote:Another idea is to revisit the existing tool icons and see if they need to be moved somewhere (or maybe even removed). Maybe creating more dockers for less used tools instead of tools on the icon. I know with the drawing aids and grid tools have odd interactions when you use them currently on the left toolbar.

For example, the grid tool icon just moves the grid when you click it. It is kind of odd, because it won't turn the tool on if it is off. When you click it, you also don't get any options for spacing and such. Those are currently in the preferences. We might need to rethink that workflow.

There is also an edit perspective grid tool that is very related to the ruler assistant editor tool. The ruler assistant editor tool is much more than rulers now as well. Cleaning up the existing tools might be a better first step.

1) The Grid tool is not working as supossed anyway(no snapping ). It either needs cleaning up or removed. There's a couple of wish-bugs requesting for alternate grids to be added to it, like isometric or hexagonal grids.

1b) Similarly, Krita actually HAS guides... but they don't render right , which is why they were disabled all together.

2) The perspective tool is currently noted to be 'useless', there's even a bugreport from boudewijn stating it is. Either we replace it with Deevad's proposal(something that was supossed to be done, but noone seems to have the time), or we get rid of it.

3) The assistant tool... Well, as implied, I call it the assistant tool because it assists. I don't call it ruler assistant any more.
The assistants exist as nodes that can be grouped into assistants. All of this is managed by an the assistant decoration class, which in turn is handled by canvas decorations, which is handled by canvas widget decorations, which handles grids, guides, assistants, selection-drawing and text-widgets, and in turn is handled by the canvas/view.
It having previews now is, I think, an important step towards the future of the assistant tool. Preferably I'd want to replace the dropdown with icons, to make the ui a little more tablet friendly. (As well as have better on-canvas icons, but that'll take some time)

Ahiemstra, aka the guy who designed the sketch UI was also in favour of seperating the liquify tool, but I argued it would be difficult to express that the Liquify is part of the transform tools and thus can be applied as a transform mask. Transform masks must be taken into consideration when redesigning this bit of UI.

this post got a little off topic, but whatever. For now, I will try to spend a little time and do the following with these transform options (when not doing media outreach stuff)

1. Re-arrange the layout to be closer to what my mockups look like http://www.scottpetrovic.com/uploads/kr ... ons-v2.pdf
2. Make a few tweaks to the icons

I will see how much I can do.

I spent a little bit of time and tweaked the icons to be more consistent with the other icons. this is what my build looks like now locally.

@TheraHedwig - You did a great job with these. I hope you are ok with me making some tweaks.



One thing I changed visually was removing the drop on each liquify mode. We already clicked the liquify tool, so it seems redundant to put the liquify icon on each action.

Also, I removed the grid on the liquify transform icon. The other transform modes rely on modifying anchor points to work with them. The liquify mode does not follow this workflow. Maybe it is using anchor points in the background, but the liquify tool works more like a brush than a transform tool.

Any changes before I commit these?

I will start working on the layout after this.

Oh, those look excellent. However, the eraser was supossed to be a sponge. While eraser communicates just fine, I thought the sponge would be nice because it indicates it only undoes the current liquify.

Feel free to choose eraser though.

@TheraHedwig: oh interesting about the sponge tool. The tool currently says "Undo: erase actions of other tools" as the tooltip. That is what made me go in the direction of eraser.

I have most of the UI options updated for the transform tools in a branch. I am working on the free and perspective options now (about 50% done with that). That is probably the most complex section out of all of them. It will probably be slightly different than what is in the wireframe - but not by much. My goal is to finish in the next day or two.

Excellent!

I have most of it checked in for the transform UI stuff in a branch. I want to do some polish and tweaking tonight.

After spending some more time with all of these tools, the perspective options seem odd. All of the options that you get don't actually change the perspective at all. They just change the free transform properties. All you really need to do for the perspective options is to select the anchor points and vanishing point(s) on the canvas. The options don't state that at all.

Do we need those options? I feel like it is complicating that feature quite a bit. I almost feel like it would be more clear to replace all of those options with a message like "Drag the anchor points to force the perpsective. When two anchor points begin to converge, a vanishing point dot will appear that you can move".

scottpetrovic wrote:I have most of it checked in for the transform UI stuff in a branch. I want to do some polish and tweaking tonight.

After spending some more time with all of these tools, the perspective options seem odd. All of the options that you get don't actually change the perspective at all. They just change the free transform properties. All you really need to do for the perspective options is to select the anchor points and vanishing point(s) on the canvas. The options don't state that at all.

Do we need those options? I feel like it is complicating that feature quite a bit. I almost feel like it would be more clear to replace all of those options with a message like "Drag the anchor points to force the perpsective. When two anchor points begin to converge, a vanishing point dot will appear that you can move".

Glad you brought this up. I agree your your assessment on the perspective options. It is a bit to convoluted when it should be a bit more simple.