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Comment by numlock86 | Hacker News Reader

I try Krita every now and then (probably will again with this release) but I always find myself going back to Clip Studio Paint at some point. The out of the box experience is just better somehow.

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Krita shortcuts were not chosen by someone who draw.

Why do you need 2 hands to rotate the view, one of my hand have the pen in it ?!?

Huh? 4 and 6 rotate left/right, and 5 rotates to the central position. If you have a keypad it's even more accessible.

I press Ctrl-Shift (or was it Ctrl-Alt?) with the left hand and rotate with the pen. Sorry muscle memory only.

I think it's just Shift.

Shift is the tip size adjustment

From the release notes:

- Krita now have a Clip Studio Paint compatible shortcut scheme

Wait, is that only now? I'm kind of confused, maybe I've been on a beta branch or something, I could of sworn that was part of 5.1?

You're right, I'm looking at the release notes now. But it's a very weird deja vu moment. There are a couple of features listed here that I really thought were already released. I need to check what my upstream is...

"Could of?"

Should of, would of, could of.

I sure hope you're mocking those.

Might of, may of, will of, can't of, must of, ought to of... There's no end to the horror.

You're not wrong.

Oh wait... I mean YOUR not wrong.

As tempting as it would admittedly be to get into an extended argument with someone online over prescriptivism and descriptivism in English grammar, it has nothing to do with Krita, so it's imo better not to engage with these kinds of really off-topic comments. Not that I'm always good at resisting the urge myself ;)

Or maybe it's good to inform people that they're not using legitimate English, so they can learn.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I don't know if it helps your issue, but this latest update does include a set of Clip Studio Paint compatible key bindings.

It's tough to judge because I'm not familiar with the shortcuts anymore but around the time that CSP swapped to the subscription model (or however it works) Krita devs started implementing a CSP mode that changes the default shortcuts to try and match.

I don't know how close it actually is though.

Ah, I tried it a years or two ago.

It's limited vector painting tools are what keep me in Clip Studio. It's the first thing I look for with each Krita release.

I suspect it's probably going to be a while unfortunately. I'm all-in on Open Source, there's no way I'm moving back to CSP, but the lack of vector drawing in Krita has driven me to learn more about Blender grease pencil. It's got both some really amazing features and some frustrating limitations as well.

Truthfully, CSP is also not quite everything I would want out of vector tools, it's just closer. What I've been interested in for a while and haven't been able to replicate is drawing in multiple passes: draw a stroke's position, then its thickness, then its strength, then its velocity, all as separate steps.

CSP sort of has this; you can redraw vector strokes (or at least could last time I used it), and it was great. But I feel like it could be taken further and I feel like it's an area where there could be a lot of innovation beyond what CSP even allows. But I don't think there's consensus yet from the Krita team about what direction they would want to go, and to be fair, I'm not sure I would be able to answer that question either. I'm not sure just copying CSP would be the right move, I do want to see more actual experimentation in that space beyond just vector layers -- like ideally I'd like to be able to do multiple-pass strokes in paint layers too?

But it is a really big weakness of the app right now, I agree.

For vector art have you looked at Inkscape?

I have, I couldn't get into it. Might have been a learning curve issue; Grease pencil also had a giant learning curve and I've only recently started to feel more comfortable with it.

But I just found Inkscape really awkward and clunky to use for any kind of illustration or free-drawing. I think Blender in some ways might have an advantage there because there are enough obvious cool features with Grease pencil (3D integration, rendering pipelines) that it provides more motivation to get past the "how the heck am I supposed to draw comfortably in this" hurdle. And it needs those motivators, Grease pencil is not comfortable to draw in without changing some settings and learning more about the general Blender interface; it's got a huge barrier to entry.

It's possible I could get Inkscape configured and comfortable to use, but I just didn't have enough reason to get over the hurdle. Or maybe it is actually too clunky to use more like a painting app; but I want to give it the benefit of the doubt since I'm less familiar with it.

Inkscape is good for many things, but not for painting.

I recently started doing more vector work as preliminary layouts/color flatting for digital painting in other apps and Inkscape has come a long way.

The energy you can muster to go back and learn more Blender will pay off in the long term imo.

Blender is like the Swiss Army knife program of my dreams.

Not an artist, but what's limiting about the vector painting? Is it something that could be fixed by a plug-in?

In my experience, unlike an SVG path that has a single line thickness and opacity value, a vector stroke in Clip Studio Paint has thickness and opacity data per point. In addition, these points can have image textures, just like the raster brushes. These features make the vector path better depict a hand-drawn stroke. A Clip Studio user can easily switch between vector and raster mode with the same brush, but Krita cannot achieve this.

The Blender Grease Pencil also represents vector data in this way (per-point attributes). I find it promising and try to develop add-ons for it. But I am not familiar with Krita plug-in development and do not know how much its vector painting can be improved.

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