On Mon, 21 May 2001, Nick Lamb wrote: > On Mon, May 21, 2001 at 05:47:33PM +0200, Raphael Quinet wrote: > > One of the things that has been mentioned several times while > > discussing the distribution of plug-ins is the fact that the menus are > > too crowded, and new users can easily get lost. The user interface is > > indeed a significant problem, but I think that it should be handled > > separately from the packaging issues. > > Yup. How about we provide a user-friendly "Gimp Themes" (don't call it > that if you don't want to) feature > > At install time the user can pick from whatever themes came with Gimp > and with any auxiliary plug-in packages or whatever > > "Potato Shop convert" > "Expert pixel hacker" > "Web wrangler" > "Just the basics" > "Ms Finger Paint" > > Themes define the keyboard shortcuts (possible today) the menu layout > (probably not too hard) and the toolbox icons (maybe harder). > The "menu-path" built into a plug-in would become only a recommendation. > We might like to consider whether themes can be added together (which > would make it easier for 3rd parties) or not. > I think that such a customizability feature would be a great idea. However, what could be a better idea is to separate the themes into sections (E.g: menus, toolbox, keyboard, dialogs), and the sections themselves into chunks. One could combine more than one chunk to create a superposition of chunks, or a total section. Now, the question is whether are we going to supply an editor for the various components of the theme, or are we going rely on the fact that they will be created by experienced hackers who know how to edit text files. The best solution in the long run, will be to allow the user to customize his own environment GUIishly, but that will take a lot of hacking. In any case, if anybody is up to "theming" the GIMP's customization in this way, then I am all for it. In my opinion, this will take a lot of time and effort to implement, but it will make the GIMP a more attractive program. Regards, Shlomi Fish > Users would be able to edit all the features of the theme they're using, > and remove or change (nearly) everything put into the menus by the PDB > in Gimp 1.2, plus adding one-click toolbox icons for scripts, filters > etc. basically customising Gimp until it's almost unrecognisable. > > BUT by providing a half dozen or so themes which cover the most common > types of user coming to Gimp, all but the most demanding would never > need to tweak themes at all. (Except those of us creating themes) > > e.g. "Ms Finger Paint" could have very little functionality hidden in > sub-menus, and a lot of "useless" tools like draw-a-filled-circle which > mimic the features available in a similarly package. > > Nick. > _______________________________________________ > Gimp-developer mailing list > Gimp-developer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx > http://lists.xcf.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/gimp-developer > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Shlomi Fish shlomif@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Home Page: http://t2.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/ Home E-mail: shlomif@xxxxxxxxxx A more experienced programmer does not make less bugs. He just realizes what went wrong more quickly.
