And really personally i find Photoshop UI atrocious and if i had to chose between that and GIMP's i'd pick GIMP any time (though overall i actually prefer PSP7's UI which IMO is the best of any of those).
And really personally i find Photoshop UI atrocious and if i had to chose between that and GIMP's i'd pick GIMP any time (though overall i actually prefer PSP7's UI which IMO is the best of any of those).
Last time I checked ps still defaulted to require control-shift-something-non-standard for redo, unless you customize the key mappings. there are much more standard bindings and they even admit the only reason for this default is legacy users .
Having said that i think Photoshop's non-standard Undo/Redo use is that it uses Ctrl+Z as a "last step undo" in that Ctrl+Z flips between undo/redo so that if you do some operation, press Ctrl+Z, it undoes that operation and if you press Ctrl+Z again it redoes it (and Ctrl+Z again undoes it, etc). This is because Photoshop at the past, like many other programs, had only a single step undo where Ctrl+Z would undo the last operation - including undo itself (so if you painted, undo would undo the paint and the next undo would undo the undo itself thus restoring the paint). Many artists used to this as a way to quickly compare the result of operations like crops, filters, etc so it became part of their workflow and was mentioned in articles, books, etc so Adobe most likely decided to use a different key when they introduced an undo stack. That was at a time that many other programs still had a single undo step so using a different key wouldn't really be non-standard. But again that became part of workflow, documented, etc so both remained as they were to avoid alienating users.
Though TBH that is based on my very brief use of Photoshop many many years ago, things may have changed since then.
Note that some simple programs still work like that, e.g. Notepad only has a single level of undo and pressing undo again undoes the undo itself.
To be more precise, after looking again the issue was, there was no way to use control-z for multiple undo without remapping the keyboard. Looks like they finally fixed it:
In older versions of Photoshop, you could only press Ctrl + Z once to undo your most recent change. If you wanted to undo more changes, you had to change the shortcut keys to Ctrl + Alt + Z.
from version 20.0.0 (CC 2019) onwards, we can just press Ctrl + Z which makes things a little easier
There was a blog post by a product engineering at adobe that lamented they had to stick with it for so long for legacy reasons. This supports your point that many parts of the UX would likely be much different given a modern clean sheet design.