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Comment by erremerre | Hacker News Reader

I never understood this UI problem.

Because... You can copy the UI of the leader and problem solved.

There you have GIMP with an absolute nightmare UI to use, but people keep saying, just get used to it. On the other hand, a single developer, in javascript, made a copy of photoshop, and most people I know prefer to use that over GIMP...

Just copy the UI that works, if you can't research your own UI.

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>Because... You can copy the UI of the leader and problem solved.

For whatever reason, the FreeCAD community is explicitly against taking note from competitors. Copying the UI of the leader is a thoughtcrime.

No it isn’t, stop being silly.

What's the name of said copy? Would gladly test it because I have a hard time with Linux right now due to not being able to just use Photoshop. Currently trying Krita and it's alright, because GIMP is just unusable.

https://www.photopea.com/

I use GIMP and FreeCAD quite often and find them very powerful programs, but maybe I'm some sort of genius? I think where these programs don't do well is among the crowd who expect to be able to just click around an advanced piece of software and somehow it just works to get things done! For basic apps this is a reasonable expectation, but CAD is not a simple process.

PS: I've still not managed to learn Blender, not put enough hours in, it is a hugely complex beast of a program that basically requires keyboard shortcut use imho. That interface (beautiful as it is) has so many options that even if I know what I'm looking for I can't find it!

Yeah, to use these UIs you gotta think like a programmer.

Part of what made Blender accessible around 2001-2002 when I was using it regularly was a really great paperback book[1] that served as a tutorial and reference. The UX was strange to be sure but after reading through the ~200 pages and getting acclimatized, it all began to feel sensible. If not for that book I would have bounced off Blender and never looked back.

[1] https://www.abebooks.com/Blender-Book-Carsten-Wartmann-Starc...

Do you mean photopea?

Great alternative in-browser.

I do, it is indeed. I'm always surprised that a single developer in javascript managed to do it.

Same. When I first saw it, I couldn't believe that was possible in the browser.

It makes me want to investigate that style of application.

I think it even works offline.

Why do you think GIMP is a nightmare? I don’t find it problematic at all. The only issue I’m hitting once in a while is that I click on a button on the toolbar, and I guess I hit its edge, as I doesn’t switch modes. Other than that, I don’t have any complaints at all. What are yours?

It's mostly a received holdover opinion from the days when Gimp still defaulted to being strongly multi-windowed. The people who keep repeating it probably haven't used Gimp for a while. The usability may still not match Photoshop, but at this point the Gimp UI is largely conventional for this genre of software.

Popular opinions take ages to shift sadly.

Yes, I learned on Paint Shop Pro and have used many image editors over the years. GIMP is very similar to the rest of them.

Adding a text that has a couple of pixel white borders is something possible in GIMP, yet a nightmare compared with photopea which just copy cs2 way of doing it.

And that is without having to edit the text in case you made a tipo.

Now, if we are talking about doing batch image editing in python. Gimp us the best tool I've found.

> There you have GIMP with an absolute nightmare UI to use, but people keep saying, just get used to it.

Which is something I find odd that so many people seem to assume GIMP as the de-facto open source photoshop alternative when Krita is more analogous and much easier to use.

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