Before someone flames me for saying this: This is my own opinion, and I don't have any relevant examples or arguments to back them up. But I agree with Serhiy. To me the toolbar is too large and could be cut down significantly. Maybe slightly smaller icons, different style checkboxes and sliders and some less whitespace between menu options. I have really come to like how blender does this for instance. the gimp-painter version (the version that is bundled with the DVD open movie workshop/character design by David Revoy. Since there seem to be several versions around) has a standard menu layout which appeals more to me. But having read the blog about GEGL and UI integration, I'm hoping for a bit more of a modal and scale-able UI (again, like blender does it) with the ability to save a layout as default. Even an option to have more default layouts. Like photoshop introduced a while back (CS4? I haven't used photoshop in a long time, so don't start flaming me for bringing it up, it's still relevant, and photoshop seemed to get the idea from blender, which had this WAAAAY earlier.)
Actually… it's even older idea and even Blender got it from elsewhere. The thing is: I don't believe anyone now can say and prove "who" was first. But I degress… :)
I can envision a work-space where you don't really have a layer toolbar open, but a node editor (with backdrop/main image if you need it) which you can scale/re-position, and do all your GEGL operations and magic with nodes, and be back to your main image/paint/edit window with the click of a shortcut.
I'd take it a bit futher: most frequently used node sequences grouped together in another nodes, to save, reuse and share with others.
Again, I love how blender does this: CTRL+up-down-maximizes active window/view CTRL+left-right moves to different layout (animation/modeling/compositing) in node editor: MMB pans the view, CTRL+MMB zooms the view, ALT+MMB pans the backdrop(main) image I just don't think disabling a tool I don't often use is a good option for me. Because one day I might not use it a lot and another day I might. I can make different layouts for that if I want to. Which would not only restrict me to changing the size and tools of my "main paint/selection/cloning tools" toolbar, but any other element and window (layers, image, histogram, GEGL nodes/operations, etc. I just take up the whole toolbar idea and bring the entire UI in the mix to give some thoughts about the new approach with GEGL (imo this could mean the whole old fashioned "legacy" layers toolbar could go out the window)
I think the best thing that could happen to GIMP and is mostly happening right now, is dividing it into "core" and "UI" parts. We have a prototype of a "core" in the form of GEGL. If only all other ops like painting with brushes could be also abstracted from "UI", we'd have a great base for all purpose, raster graphics editor with interchangeable GUIs (much like FF is over XULRunner). Imagine "GIMP" with Blender toolkit :).
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