Hello,

I am new to Krita and I like a lot about the program. One thing that I would love to see improved is the toolbar that is, by default, docked to the left side (the one with all the icons). Currently, it is very crowded with a lot of icons, making it a bit difficult to quickly find what you are looking for. I would like to see some of these tools grouped together into one place with the ability to click-hold to get a menu to select a similar tool.

For example, the line and polygon tools (rectangle tool, circle tool, etc.) could all be together in one space. Rarely does someone need easy access to all of them. And a simple click-hold to reveal the others take very little additional time. But there would be time-savings by not having to glance through the multitude of icons on this tool bar.

The same could be said for the several selection/lasso tools, the helper tools (measure and assistant tool), various brush tools, and even the paint bucket and gradient tool could be grouped into one place (since they are both tools that fill a page or selection).

Doing something like this would not only clean up the UI, but make it faster/easier to find what you are looking for.

Thanks.

The 'Toolbar' is the line of icons along the top of the main window under the menu items.

The 'Toolbox', like other dockers can be repositioned and rearranged (even onto another monitor if you have one) and the arrangement saved as a named Workspace.

Here's one example of how you might arrange the Toolbox where similar tools are automatically grouped together:

Hiding some of the tools in the toolbox behind popout buttons might look cleaner, but it would add extra clicks when people actually use those tools, and that's a bad idea, so we won't do that.

Hiding some of the tools in the toolbox behind popout buttons might look cleaner, but it would add extra clicks when people actually use those tools, and that's a bad idea, so we won't do that.

It's not just about looking cleaner, but about proper organization so that users can quickly and easily locate the tools they want to use. Having all tools exposed in the toolbox is an even worse idea as it makes it more difficult to find a tool at a glance. There are just too many. There is a reason so many programs, like Photoshop, Clip Studio Paint, etc., use popout buttons. It's a tested and tried method that has worked very well for literally decades.

As far as extra clicks, that's only the case for those seldom used tools. The most often used ones would appear by default, unless the end-user selects another one.

If you take the philosophy of not adding extra clicks from time to time, then you will ultimately end up with a GUI filled with all sorts of revealed icons that just crowd the available space.

While organizing the toolbox might make some people happy with the saved space, it will make other people angry with more clicks. With other areas in the application that get heavy usage, making it customizable is usually the solution that everyone agrees on and that gets done (even though that solution is solving a different issue than what you are describing).

Being able to decide which elements to show and hide on the toolbox is probably going to be the solution that gets done. Personally, I only use about 5 tools on the toolbox. I would rather just see those 5 tools instead of having to use a popout menu to see the variations of a tool.

Krita already has a "blacklist" concept to hide certain tools on the toolbox. It is not available on the UI right now and stored in the kritarc file. I think making a UI to manage that blacklist is probably a good first step. We might be able to later extend that configuration to make certain buttons groupings like you are wanting.

I am kind of wanting to code that GUI, but am working on another UX ticket right now with the welcome screen.

ArgentArts wrote:It's not just about looking cleaner, but about proper organization so that users can quickly and easily locate the tools they want to use. Having all tools exposed in the toolbox is an even worse idea as it makes it more difficult to find a tool at a glance. There are just too many. There is a reason so many programs, like Photoshop, Clip Studio Paint, etc., use popout buttons. It's a tested and tried method that has worked very well for literally decades.

The tools are properly organized in groups. I have been working on Krita since 2003, and I have seen Photoshop move to the popout system, not because it's cleaner, but because they had so many tools the toolbox wouldn't fit anymore. Photoshop is anything but clean, and not an example. There's a reason we don't add tools that don't need to be tools, like smudge or eraser; we want to keep to toolbox count down.

And no, it has never worked very well. Those tool popouts have always been a ghastly hack. I have hated it since it first appeared, and I think it's Photoshop's biggest UI disaster.

ArgentArts wrote:As far as extra clicks, that's only the case for those seldom used tools. The most often used ones would appear by default, unless the end-user selects another one.

If you take the philosophy of not adding extra clicks from time to time, then you will ultimately end up with a GUI filled with all sorts of revealed icons that just crowd the available space.

Nice reductio ad absurdum, but no cigar.