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Comment by Retr0id | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone else find non-destructive editing kinda unintuitive?

I get the practical benefits of it, but it feels shoehorned in to an interface for doing destructive edits. Chained edits frequently interact in ways that confuse/surprise me.

I think I'd rather do non-destructive edits via some sort of node-editor interface. (And to be honest most of the things I use GIMP for don't need non-destructive editing in the first place)

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The current non-destructive UI is a bit of a compromise - we can't really mix layers with NDE filters in the layer dock until GTK4 (from what I understand), so the pop-up menu is what we had to work with.

You can check "Merge filter" at the bottom of the filter dialogue though, and it will automatically merge the filter like in 2.10 (and the setting is remembered going forward)

This is one of those things I'd think geeks would geek out about, as nondestructive edits mean the steps to construct an image are stored, not just the final image—kinda like a monad in FP.

nondestructive edits are great, it's the interface that's weird

"When I was a kid, when we shrunk a 200x200 image down to 100x100 we lost information forever, and we liked it that way. It was a simple time. A predictable time."

That is generally my intention when downscaling an image.

Until you're a professional designer and they ask you to "scale up this part" or something. Then you realize that your actual intention is having the original layer currently rendered at that size and did not actually intend to permanently modify the original so you can't go back.

Once you export it is, of course, actually downscaled.

Same idea behind masks and modifiers and the like. Most modern creation tools try to give ample opportunity for non-destructive modification to simpler, immutable primitive layers.

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