I am facing a really frustrating problem with eraser not being a separate tool. Eraser not being independent of brush assistants or dynamic brush settings.

I draw layouts for animation and I heavily use assistants like parallel ruler and vanishing point. I also use dynamic brush for curved objects. But when I want to erase, I never want assistants or mass-drag. Now I have to press two hotkeys to switch to eraser or back. This may not sound so tough, but its easy to get stuck because of the permutations involved and I have to 'think' my way to eraser and back without missing a key each time. If we had a separate eraser tool, I could instead use a single key-stroke with my muscle memory.

Separate Eraser tool can also let us use a different brush preset to erase with.
So I vote hard for separate eraser tool.

Hm, actually, after the previous forum post about an eraser tool, I was tempted to just add one, but reading your description of your workflow issues, I'm not so sure that that's the right solution. It might be easy and straightforward to add a separate eraser tool, but I'd like to dig a little deeper.

From what you say, you want to easily switch between drawing with the magnetic assistant on and erase with the assistant off. But what if someone wants to do that, but also do some shading with the assistant off? That would be a third tool. Or maybe someone wants to easily switch between freehand drawing with stabilizer and erasing without, for instance.

So my next thought was to make it possible to configure a number of freehand drawing tools, say, between 1 and 5, and associate a shortcut, an icon, a default preset and tool settings with them, and show all tools in a row in the toolbox. But that would make the toolbox unwieldy and it would be something completely new, ui-wise in Krita.

Next thought: what if introduced the concept of tool presets? For the freehand tool, that would mean you could set the tool options, the default preset and and maybe an icon and save them under a name. Krita is already preset-crazy, so that would fit the expected workflow. The only thing is that we need shortcuts and maybe a toolbar or docker area to quickly switch between tool presets. We could even ship with a number of default freehand tool presets:

* plain brush
* plain eraser
* magnetic brush
* stabilized brush
* ...

I think that if we would design the user interface for this idea of tool presets correctly it would not only solve your workflow problem better than a separate eraser tool would, but it would be more flexible and also solve other problems.

Or... would being able to assign macros to keyboard shortcuts, and even presets, be a more elegant solution?

(c:

Boudewijn, hotkeys for each tool preset would be great, actually much better than just a separate eraser tool. And we can choose when brush type and size will be shared or be independent between these tool presets.. right?

I like where this idea is going. When it comes to tools and brushes I tend to be a simpleton for me less is more. Having a few customizable tools that can be placed in the tool bar each with its own settings free and independant of each other would be an awesome addition to krita in my opinion