I made a thread a bit earlier on UI Design flaws and pointed out roughly 7 issues with the default UI design in there as well as brought up the argument of high res vs low res default configuration. However as the first commenter said, it's best to focus down one thing at a time (and also makes for an easier discussion)

And so, I picked out the one I thought would be easiest to discuss, the status bar, and threw in the scroll bar because I just realized that no one uses the scroll bar in a digital painting application especially if one has a tablet pen, it's just less effort to pan with the pen, and even if you do have a mouse the same is true. Please if someone here actually does use it, do chime in, but I'd even argue that no photoshop user nor corel painter user would use the scrollbar either. It's just taking up space, luckily not a lot of space, but enough space to actually count.

The only use I can think of for the scrollbar is if you're zoomed really far in and need to go up real fast, but now that we have a functional navigator.... that need just got nullified again. Krita could be ahead of photoshop and painter to realize this. If Krita is the first digital painting/image editing program someone ever opens then sure, theres a tiny, astronomically low chance they won't figure out to press middle mouse or hold space bar to pan, but what are the chances of either of these happening?

Does anyone here actually use the scroll bar?

So I've at least thrown it out there that the scroll bar(s) are redundant and I feel that they should be removed, or at least that it should be easy to toggle them off (permanently), but what about the status bar?

If we look at this status bar (You can see the scroll bars aswell in there) for a sec, what is the only thing a painter would possibly, hypothetically even want to see? It's the zoom bar in the corner.

But in the latest builds of Krita, this zoom bar is already intergrated into the Overview Docker (which could possibly afford being renamed into navigator, now that it has navigation functions and further obsoletes the need for scroll bars; maybe you can get creative and call it a minimap ) there's nothing there worth seeing while you're painting, this is a great chance to follow Google's clever design of their Chrome browser where the status bar is hidden unless there is something to see in it (for example when downloading files).

I believe that Sven nailed the only actual use in the status bar. "You need to have at least some kind of statusbar to show a progressbar and the zoom stuff. " with the zoom stuff in the overview docker there's no need for it at the status bar anymore (although in case of someone not wanting to use the overview docker, it would be nice if the zoom stuff could be added to the top menu next to the brush sliders or something). And the progress bar can be handled either as a popup, or with a temporary status bar at the bottom while saving files and such.

I believe removing these two, or at least turning them off by default will make the application feel like it's more "spacious" and like the drawing area is bigger, even if it's just a couple of pixels vertically and even less of them horizontally, they count more than you'd know. Status bars belong in the past, and applications intended to always be in windowed mode rather than maximized. Scrollbars are for applications where there is a lot of content and the mouse-wheel scrool or middle mouse pan isn't fast enough (like ToU dialogs ), this is not a problem for a digital painting application since while a canvas can be pretty huge, with the overview/navigator, it's easy to just click roughly where you want to go and then pan the camera to the precise location you want it at. It's also easy to just zoom out and pan and then zoom back in which is what I have come to normally do since I've been using the stable build lately.

For the status bar, that might need more discussion about if it can be used for anything more useful. Just because it might not be super useful now, doesn't necessarily mean we need to get rid of it. The zooming on the bottom right is a somewhat common UI thing, so keeping that there might be a good idea. It also tells you what brush you have selected (maybe that could be put elsewhere?). I don't see it as that important of a thing.

For the scroll bars, that is actually a configurable option right now (Configure Krita > Display). I could see it become more useful when the MDI (multiple document interface) gets added to master and there are multiple images open. Once that gets added, I think we could revisit this point and see it that works.

1. Remove status bar
2. Put an additional toolbar there
3. Convert status bar elements into toolbar elements
4. Rebuilt status bar into it using the new toolbar elements

Now the status bar is same as before, but it becomes fully configurable by user.

Toolbars are a wonderful thing, I already replaced the toolbox by an extra toolbar on my Krita config, which allows me to keep only the tools I want on it (the toolbox docker is too crowded IMO, and it's not configurable).

Now there's a good idea I wouldn't be able to complain about the status bar if it had a practical use and would be fully configurable.

I agree with you on the toolbox, the tools need to be better categorized and should have separators. Also some tools should be simplified into one tool (like many other programs do it, you can right click the tool and set it to a different mode, for example, the rectangle and ellipse drawing tools could be the same button. The basic shape selection tools could also be just one button. Select with freehand stroke and select with brush stroke could also be one button, etc.

And like I said they should use separators to categorize the types of tools in the toolbar.

I think it might be more efficient though to just combine the status bar with the toolbar at the top, it's elements could simply be aligned to the right (or be a third toolbar of it's own by default placed to the left of the usual toolbar that has the brush settings and mirror mode buttons and all that jive)

scottpetrovic wrote:For the status bar, that might need more discussion about if it can be used for anything more useful. Just because it might not be super useful now, doesn't necessarily mean we need to get rid of it. The zooming on the bottom right is a somewhat common UI thing, so keeping that there might be a good idea. It also tells you what brush you have selected (maybe that could be put elsewhere?). I don't see it as that important of a thing.

For the scroll bars, that is actually a configurable option right now (Configure Krita > Display). I could see it become more useful when the MDI (multiple document interface) gets added to master and there are multiple images open. Once that gets added, I think we could revisit this point and see it that works.

Status bars in general have always been useless in the vast majority of programs that include them. It's technical stuff that the general user will probably never even look at. Although I did find it useful when it can display a bigger thumbnail and information about the dimensions and whatnot of a selected image file, and similar with video files in file managers, but that's about the only thing I have ever actually used a status bar for. Status bars are just... an outdated UI element, I'd say, there are better ways to achieve everything status bars do.

As for showing what brush is in use, my immediate suggestion is to show that on the top toolbar where you have the brush preset button (next to where you can set the brush blending mode) basically replace that stupid button that is right now an image of a bunch of boxes, with the icon of the currently selected brush. It would make much more sense that way.

I didn't know that scrollbars could be disabled! thanks for letting me know! Now for things to look the way I want them to on launch, all that is needed is to make the "hide status bar" option stick.