Hi. I've been struggling with setting up the pop-up palette, and wanted to both express this, plus see if there is an easier way or some sort of fix.

I really like Krita, yet certain things prevent me from using it as my core paint/drawing program. One of them is the overwhelming number of brushes, only in that the icons and names are sometimes vague or counterproductive (ex... Many have a single letter in front of the proper name, adding 'noise' to the visual recognition of the names... plus, it seems the lists are not properly alphabetically sorted. These, combined, result in a lot of scrolling and searching for items. Is there not even a search feature?).

Granted, there is the tag system, which initially seems like a great solution. However, going through each brush and sorting them into appropriate tags is, itself, tedious, in the number of clicks required. I keep wishing for a simple drag-and-drop kind of interface with that, where there are windows for each tag, and you can (multiple item) select icons and drag them to the desired tag window. With this kind of system, you also see, at a glance, the present content of EACH tag simultaneously, rather than having to click on each one individually, and bringing up the tag menu. Tagging should be treated similar to drive windows in an O/S. You open as many tag windows as you want, and simply drag-and-drop icons to/from each... copying or moving (which would also serve nicely to not only move, but delete a brush from a tag after the move in one action).

That all said, this wouldn't be as much of an issue if there wasn't (what appears to be) some sort of glitch/bug, where after spending half an hour assigning tags, the tag list gets corrupted with duplicate copies... I ended up with about 20 Favorites, as well as a duplicate of each tag.

To top it off, when I then deleted the duplicates that were spamming my list, I somehow ended up deleting the custom tag I was working all day on, despite never selecting and deleting it.... Bringing me right back where I started, and losing all that (tedious) work.

At that point, I gave up on trying to set up Krita, and brining it into my workflow.

Again, I like Krita, and appreciate the work that the team has done... but things like this really make it (currently) not worth the trouble, and I wish there was a fix or alternate method. Admittingly, maybe I'm doing something wrong, and I'm not here to say 'Krita sucks'. So, I just wanted to share that, and hear from other users, hopefully revealing workarounds, fixes, or pointing out my errors.

I'm on Krita 4.4(?) on PC.

Hi ladlon,
There is a search bar at the bottom of the brush preset docker (Settings > Dockers > Brush presets). Read the documentation here.

The resource system is being worked upon so it might help in fixing some bugs, But I haven't encountered with the duplicate tag bug that you describe, May be reporting it to bugs.kde.org will be helpful.

With regards to the tagging improvement you suggest we do have such feature in palette docker, where you can create groups of colour swatches and drag and drop colours among them, It is an interesting idea of tags to be seen as folders in the preset docker, we can invite more painters to discuss this.

Hi, thanks for the response. I'll be looking into it further.

Oddly enough, I found out about the issue (before running into it myself) from a YouTube video (Krita tutorial) where the woman runs into it while explaining the pop-up-palette. A duplicate of each tag suddenly appears (so the list ends up with two of each tag). In my case, that happened, PLUS I had about 20 Favorite tags suddenly appear (many empty).

Here's the video where it occurs:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjoaFd6iBZM

One of the core problems with the system is that it requires you to select the item, open up a menu, select an item, then select another from that list.... which, in itself, is not a horrible thing... until you multiply that by the 50 or so times you have to do it for each brush. Simply having everything 'up in the root' (all on the screen at once, rather than buried in menus) would help greatly. As well, having a MOVE command, where the tag is not only assigned, but then REMOVED from the original location, would eliminate having to do the process twice (once to assign the tag, and the other to remove the tag from the original 'location').

Yes, we know the bug is there, and we are rewriting the resource system to get rid of it it(amongst other bugs), but it'll take a while before that is done.

Ya, if at all possible, I'd really love to see the tagging system replaced (or accompanied) by an alternate method where you simply drag and drop items into the pop-up palette (which would then auto configure the tags under the hood). Ideally, you could open up a window for each tag, and drag-drop items to/from them as well.

Added bonus: It would be great if the tag list was visible right away in the pop-up palette, rather than having to always click on the little icon to reveal it each time.

Yea managing brush tags definitely feels cumbersome, I hardly do it (not only because it's buggy) and probably would end up having to do one custom tag per project anyway which gets messy quickly. Hence also hardly use the popup palette at all
Okay, the really hard to reach second button on my pen doesn't help either, but I probably could work with a key binding...

Anyway, I mostly rely on the brush history docker, and when the brushes I need drop out I have the normal docker in a tab at the same location. But the brush history is really just a limited workaround, and somehow always the brushes I need all the time keep dropping out and those I just used for a few strokes stick there forever.

Drag and drop onto the palette and have that saved with the document would be awesome. I also started using color palettes saved with the document btw, which helps me a lot keeping things organized nicely, just wish I hadn't to load it manually each time.

Cool idea with the Brush History. I have to check that out. Thanks!

It would also be REALLY helpful to have a check box or the like to exit the Pop-Up Palette when you are done with changing all of your parameters. Currently, if I want to change to a new brush, with a different color, I have to enter and exit twice as I can only make one change at a time. Better Idea: allow users to make multiple changes, then exit the dialog with all their changes in place.

Gary

garyf wrote:It would also be REALLY helpful to have a check box or the like to exit the Pop-Up Palette when you are done with changing all of your parameters. Currently, if I want to change to a new brush, with a different color, I have to enter and exit twice as I can only make one change at a time. Better Idea: allow users to make multiple changes, then exit the dialog with all their changes in place.

Gary

+1

Lynx3d wrote: But the brush history is really just a limited workaround, and somehow always the brushes I need all the time keep dropping out and those I just used for a few strokes stick there forever.

This is because a brush preset that is selected from the history docker doesn't get placed at the top of the docker, it stays where it is. So brushes you use often in a session tend to get pushed down, then dropped off the bottom, by short time use of other brush presets from the main preset docker, which will be placed at the top of the history docker and push the others down
A 'fix' for that would be to place any newly selected brush at the top of the history docker so that, provided the docker was tall enough, often used brushes would stay at the top and rarely used ones would be pushed down and off the bottom of the docker. That would be just a minor improvement to the current situation but it would be helpful.