Hi Hadrian!

On Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 4:06 PM, Hadrien G. wrote:

Hi !

Playing with gimp lately, I've been thinking that it would be nice to be able to save the toolbox state (and maybe other things related to dockable window placement) in profiles.

As an example, when I make photo editing, I use different tools that when I draw. Thanks to gimp's system, I can make toolbox changes that reflect those needs. But it's pretty long to play with the toolbox, and as there's no "save" button available to save my changes, I don't do that that often. I think it's a bit sad.

Saving windows state would have the same purpose : being able to quickly switch between different workspaces that are useful for different works, while keeping a clean UI for each work...

Until that is implemented, you can do something like this by creating additional personal .gimp-2.x directories from copies of your base one, one for each UI configuration, and specifying which gimprc to use when running gimp (example commandline: "gimp --gimprc ~/.gimp-2.7-photoedit/gimprc"). Once you've done that, just customize the UI accordingly for each profile. Then everything is ready and you can just
create shortcuts or menu items that run a command like "gimp --gimprc ~/.gimp-2.7-photoedit".

If you want your suggestion implemented, I suggest doing it yourself. AFAIK it's not too hard, and no developer currently has enough interest in it to implement it themselves.

Hope that helps, David

Von: "Hadrien G."

Playing with gimp lately, I've been thinking that it would be nice to be able to save the toolbox state (and maybe other things related to dockable window placement) in profiles.

See http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=151538

IIRC, GIMP can already be run started with different session profiles (see the --session command line parameter). A way to switch sessions from within GIMP may be useful.

HTH, Michael

Hi Hadrien,

On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 5:48 AM, Hadrien G. wrote:

=> I'm currently using Microsoft Windows XP as my main OS. Would it help greatly to get some Linux distro back on my hard drive ?

Yes, development is much easier on Linux.

=> How does one design the gimp UI ? Are there graphical tools/XML files/other high-level things to know about ? Or is this hard-coded in some unit (and, in that case, which unit) ?

You can experiment with graphical designing using Glade. But you would need to finally code the GUI manually, since we don't use Glade in GIMP.

http://zetcode.com/tutorials/gtktutorial/

might help.

=> By the way, could one show me an example of gimp config file saving code, to know which standard applies here ? => A proposal is to switch between whole different gimprcs. Is this really wise ? I mean, shouldn't some settings stay profile-independant, say, those about memory management, help system, display (especially DPI), color management, and folders ?

That was my proposal for working with gimp as it currently is; of course this is not exactly what is wanted, just what could be done with the current gimp.

I think that one should first plot some boundaries around the profile thing. What should be included in a profile, and what shouldn't ? Personnally, I would suggest :

-Toolbox state
-Dockable windows status
-Keyboard shortcuts (maybe)
-Tool options

Does this include presets? (see tool-options directory in your personal gimp directory)

-Image window appearance (maybe)

Are you talking about whether rulers, menubar, selection, etc.. is shown in the default image window?
If so, I think that's stored in gimprc. If you're rather talking about image window position and size, it's stored in sessionrc, along with the dockable windows state.

-Extended input peripheral shortcuts (maybe)

Although Photoshop supports switching between sets of keyboard shortcuts (and presumably between sets of peripheral shortcuts), it might be quite confusing to switch between them. I think if you asked Peter, he would say "that's more trouble than it's worth".

You might consider including this too: - Device status (found in devicerc)

This would mean that when you switched between profiles, it could automatically switch to a sensible tool and sensible brush, colors, etc.

=> Should one new config file be created for each profile, and a "profile" subfolder be added to the .gimp-2.x directory ? In any case, which naming convention should I use ?

I think .gimp-2.x/profiles is probably appropriate. Each profile would almost certainly need to be a subdirectory with multiple config files (eg toolrc, sessionrc, ..) .

=> Should this setting be called a profile or workspace ?

Profile seems more accurate, to me.

=> Where should this be put in GUI to make people know about it ? The preference dialog is a pretty obvious location, but since this is more likely to be used as a tool than as a setting, shouldn't there be a specific dockable window about it ? And should this be added to the default UI or not ?

A dockable would be good while you're developing it; We should probably try to get Peter's input on what a sensible way for it to end up might be.

David