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Comment by pja | Hacker News Reader

Can they though? I'll admit it's a long time since I've sat in front of a Photoshop window, but I remember it being just as complex to use.

Is this just partially a "what you're used to is easy & anything different is hard" thing?

What exactly makes Photoshop easier to use in your opinion? This is a genuine question - I see this asserted so often, like it's a truism, but nobody ever seems to give specific examples.

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I still remember that time I tried selecting something and moving the pixels of my selection, rather than the whole layer in GIMP. I ended up having to google it and it was a 3-key combination shortcut. I don't remember how to do it in photoshop, but I'm pretty sure I didn't have to google "how to move a selection" that time I used it.

Audacity has this in spades. Every annoying thing has a bizarre undiscoverable keystroke to invoke a sensible not-broken alternative.

Why they don't make the reasonable implementations the first class defaults is way beyond me... (I haven't read the mailing list/bug report threads enough to find out, if someone has insight I'd love to know. It's like they know something is what people don't want to do 99.9% of the time, they fix it, then they hide the fix; ie deleting some audio without shifting everything over - I have never wanted to shift things on delete. Not once, never. Not a single time. Why is that default?)

What's the Photoshop to Audacity's GIMP?

Sound Forge

Fair. I think you’re expected to float the selection into a new layer and then move the layer, but this is such a common operation for people to want that it ought to be directly available from the Move tool.

This is how I've been doing it since forever and and at the very least didn't have to Google it.

I did not know another way existed... which also just illustrates the point.

It doesn't really, because you don't know how to do it in Photoshop either. I've been recently learning Photoshop for the first time after being a long term GIMP user, and I don't find it intuitive at all. If you didn't need google or books to use Photoshop, somebody should tell the enormous industry of websites and books sold to teach it.

Your comment seems disingenuous, because the predominant user interface paradigm in all sorts of programs (file managers, vector editors, text editors, ...) on all sorts of platforms is that when you select something, you can click and drag that selected thing.

This is a thing that is different in GIMP: that the selection specifies an area of the image which is affected by operations, rather than an object to manipulate.

"I did not know another way existed" seems outlandish. I mean, launch any paint program developed for any platform in the last 40 years; chances are you can select a rectangle and just drag it.

There is a rhyme and reason to the way GIMP does it, and you can learn it quickly, but it's going to cause complaints.

It could be that 99% of the anti-GIMP ranting is caused by this one issue.

>Your comment seems disingenuous

Your comment seems like you missed what was being talked about. In fact you appear to think I was arguing a point antipodal to what I was actually saying.

"I did not know another way existed" was referring to a second way to do it in GIMP.

In GIMP you can just cut it and paste it, and ctrl-x ctrl-v works, which are pretty much universal in every application. It creates a temporary layer for the selection, and when your cursor is over the selection you'll get the universal 4-axis pointer that means move, and when your cursor is not over it, it will turn into an anchor (whose meaning you can guess.)

Well moving the selection is the 3rd thing you can do, what you meant probably is moving the content of the selection. It's controlled by 3 buttons on top of the tools window, and this plus a few other things are worth spending a bit time to learn the basic concepts.

Which is a good advice for PS as well, btw.

i do remember figuring out how to move my selection without moving what's in it. it felt a little bit like gimp was playing a prank on me

Photoshop has a whole industry around teaching how to use it.

They have photoshop conferences, books and magazines. Not something you expect for a piece of software that’s intuitive.

So does Microsoft Word. I think you're missing the point. Yes, Photoshop has a lot of more advanced options, but the power of UX is being able to balance basic features and advanced features. Sure someone may not be able to do insane tricks, but doing basic stuff is far more discoverable and intuitive to do.

Also in addition to other sibling comments--note that OT mentioned having been using GIMP for 20 years and still being unable to figure out anything new aside from the tutorials he studied. So being "used to" GIMP is evidently (although currently sample size 1) not enough for it to be "easy to use".

Edit. I'm not saying Photoshop is easier to use--it might be just as difficult but with better resources available people might be able to learn it better.

Back in the late 90s when I used Photoshop as part of my Project Support / Sysadmin 50/50 position, I used books that taught me how to do certain things. I think it's just that Photoshop is that much more popular so has orders of magnitude more people writing books and HOWTOs.

I disagree, I picked up photoshop at the age of ~13 and did most things mostly naturally. I've tried GIMP 4 or 5 different times at various ages and I've never been able to achieve anything without hours of effort and guides.

I used PS and many other 3D graphics apps commercially for over 10 years, Gimp is sadly not a patch on it. UX is a thing, and Gimp doesn't have that. As a now software engineer, I can see the thought process behind the application, but it's workflow is treacherous. I switched out to Affinity a few years ago, because PS became too bloated/heavy, and Gimp just doesn't cut it for real work imho. I mention this because it was easier to pick up Affinity after a couple of hours than wrestling with Gimp. Same goes for Blender Vs Max/Maya. I hate to say this, because I would like these tool to be more accessible to all

>Is this just partially a "what you're used to is easy & anything different is hard" thing?

I woulnd't say so. Some programs are plainly more confusingly designed.

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