Hi, there has been a discussion, in 2002-2004, to allow plugged-in tools. On 2002-02-22, Sven Neumann wrote: > not discussed, but already implemented ;-) The CVS version has > preliminary support for pluggable tools that can be either loaded as > a plug-in (separate process) or as a module. I haven't looked at > the implementation details yet. What has become of this? Many of the existing plug-ins would profit of such an infrastructure, as well as new plug-ins become possible (see bug #74554). There has been repeatedly brought up the request for in-window applicability of the IWarp distort. Using IWarp in the preview pane is a nuisance and much inferior to, for example, the Photoshop Liquify tool. In fact, this has been the reason for me to consider hacking the GIMP in the first place. Then there is the issue of dialog preview visibility. Core dialogs like Levels and Curves are able to show preview directly in the image window, as opposed to plug-in dialogs which are restricted to small preview widgets. Again, this is much inferior to the real-image preview and has got me frustrated more than once. I know there have been a number of philosophical remarks in the past against pluggable tools. However, to a user ignorant to the constraining GIMP design mechanisms, these restrictions and their consequences to the UI appear arbitrary. Why stick with these at the cost of a bad UI? If it turns out unfeasible to expose the tool API, the IWarp filter could be merged into the GIMP core so it can used as a tool. However, this would not address the problem of bad preview in plugged-in filters, so maybe there is a better solution. Roland _______________________________________________ Gimp-developer mailing list Gimp-developer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU/mailman/listinfo/gimp-developer
