Hi. I have a suggestion for a new and simple way to interact with GIMP. A major difficulty in using GIMP, in my experience, is that the menus are too many and too deep. To invoke an action on an image, or to open a dialog box, the user spends a lot of time and concentration navigating the menus, usually with the mouse. And, despite best efforts to organize the menus, finding the right item for the operation you want can be difficult. A more efficient alternative would be to let the user try to express his intention more freely, and show him a menu of options that might be what he wants. This is in effect search for the right command, and the user sees the list of options *as he types*. A command is any conventional menu item or folder in the current menu hierarchy. A query matches substrings of names or descriptions of commands. The names and descriptions of matching commands appear in a drop down box underneath the query box. The user can hit Enter to select the first entry, or use the arrow keys to select another entry, then press Enter. Thus the selection of actions and menus shrinks as the user types. If a query contains multiple words, they are matched as a conjunction (not as a string). For example. if the user types "size", he sees the options "Scale image - resize the image", "Set canvas size", and "Print size". Selecting the first option invokes resize mode, as if the item "Image / Scale image" had been selected from the conventional menu. The search can be invoked with a key combination like Control+F (or perhaps just by typing?). I am not sure if the query box should be visible all the time, or appear when the keys are pressed and dissapear when the command is executed. If it is the latter, it can replace the menu bar, to save window space. The the list should not obscure too much of the image. So, the size of the results box should be constrained, and a scrollbar should appear if needed. The history of executed commands (and their descriptions) appears in reverse order the results box, if the user clicks on or presses the Down arrow key in an empty query box. What do you think? _______________________________________________ Gimp-developer mailing list Gimp-developer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU/mailman/listinfo/gimp-developer
