Re: GIMP and Photoshop user interfaces (was: Re: Distros specifically designed for children)

On Thu, 5 Jun 2025 23:42:04 -0000 (UTC)
Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

When you’re saying “get things right” you just mean “get things the
way I’m used to with Adobe products”. Or maybe it’s “Microsoft” or
“Apple” products in some other case.

Again, they could certainly pick a *different* set of accelerators than
Photoshop (and, while I didn't bother to compare, I imagine they did.)
But until this revamp (which, I will reiterate, took them *almost three
decades* to figure out,) they exhibited a fundamentally bone-headed mis-
understanding of how keyboard accelerators are supposed to work in the
first place. That's *not* a mistake Adobe made (or if they did, it'd
been fixed by v.7, which was - *checks watch* - twenty-five years ago.)

Not sure what you’re complaining about there. GIMP still offers the
choice of multi-window mode, if that’s what you prefer.

I don't prefer, actually! My beef with single-window mode is not that
multi-window mode is better (maybe you like it better, maybe you don't,
that's fine and it's good that they provide the option to switch) -
it's that single-window mode is a *less useful* response to Photoshop's
MDI interface. There is, AFAICT, still no way to view documents side-by-
side in SWM, despite GIMP's own internal dev wiki admitting that this
is a real need:

"But then in every discussion the concrete need for working
side-by-side comes up. [...] Let’s not kid ourselves: the fact that
users can work on several files inside a single application window,
means that this application must offer a substitute for window
management..."
 - https://gui.gimp.org/index.php?title=Single-window_mode_specification