On 20/10/16 19:30, lofreq wrote:

So my two questions are as follows, I guess:

1. Is it at all possible to just click and drag selections? Why is it necessary to hold down ctrl+alt to accomplish this?

Because click without key modifiers has other uses. Maybe you shouldn't be using
selections on a bigger layer, and instead be using a text layer for each piece of text.

2. Is the masking behavior of floating layers a bug or a feature? Either or, it needs fixing. Or at the very least a toggle, because I can't imagine a single instance where that would be preferable to just using an actual mask.

What you want is Layer>Layer to image size.

On 10/21/2016 01:06 AM, Ofnuts wrote:

On 20/10/16 19:30, lofreq wrote:

So my two questions are as follows, I guess:

1. Is it at all possible to just click and drag selections? Why is it necessary to hold down ctrl+alt to accomplish this?

Because click without key modifiers has other uses.

Ages ago, click-drags did move the selection content without additional modifier keys.

But we got complaints that it is far too easy to accidentally move this selected content by minute amounts and not even notice this. So it got changed to the current behavior.

Regards,
Michael
GPG: 96A8 B38A 728A 577D 724D 60E5 F855 53EC B36D 4CDD

On Fri, Oct 21, 2016 at 2:15 AM, Michael Schumacher wrote:

Ages ago, click-drags did move the selection content without additional modifier keys.

But we got complaints that it is far too easy to accidentally move this selected content by minute amounts and not even notice this. So it got changed to the current behavior.

And I can't help myself wondering if that was a case of a vocal minority affecting a design decision that now irritates a vocal majority :)

Alex

From: gimp-user-list  on behalf of Alexandre Prokoudine 
Sent: Thursday, October 20, 2016 4:41 PM
To: gimp-user-list@gnome.org
Subject: Re: [Gimp-user] Redesign "move selection"?

On Fri, Oct 21, 2016 at 2:15 AM, Michael Schumacher wrote:

> Ages ago, click-drags did move the selection content without additional
> modifier keys.
>
> But we got complaints that it is far too easy to accidentally move this
> selected content by minute amounts and not even notice this. So it got
> changed to the current behavior.

And I can't help myself wondering if that was a case of a vocal
minority affecting a design decision that now irritates a vocal
majority :)

Alex
_______________________________________________


Oh, boy, THIS subject.  Where my workflow is concerned this was the BIGGEST breaking change GIMP ever made -- yes, even bigger than when 2.8 split Save and Export.  (And we remember all the complaints over that, right?)

I am one of those where when I no-modifier click and drag a selection my preferred action is to pick up those pixels and move them around (rather than shifting the mask).  It is ... a minimum of annoying that we have zero means of configuring GIMP to match our workflow in this respect.


While the decision to change it was definitely made in good faith, I wonder if it was made largely because (1) it was easy to remap how the selection tools handle modifiers, and (2) a lack of proposed alternatives?


The first (and most obvious) alternative is to make this behavior a user configurable option in the GIMP preferences -- like we already have for whether the Move tool should default to picking to moving (I prefer picking).


A second alternative would be to give the selection tools a sensitivity threshold -- i.e. you must click and drag the cursor a minimum # of screen pixels before the tool will start the drag action.  I wonder if this could have solved most of those accidental microadjustments people complained about in GIMP 2.2 without introducing a breaking change....


-- Stratadrake
strata_ranger@hotmail.com
--------------------
Numbers may not lie, but neither do they tell the whole truth.

On Fri, 2016-10-21 at 00:29 +0000, Richard wrote:

[...]

The first (and most obvious) alternative is to make this behavior a user configurable option in the GIMP preferences -- like we already have for whether the Move tool should default to picking to moving (I prefer picking).

Fewer options better. Easier to learn. Easier to help people. Easier to test.

A second alternative would be to give the selection tools a sensitivity threshold -- i.e. you must click and drag the cursor a minimum # of screen pixels before the tool will start the drag action.

This might work or might be irritating to people who want to move by one pixel.

I wish we had on-click, on-drag script hooks so that this choice could be scripted. Imagine making the default be to move and use resynthesizer to fill in the missing details!

Without that, seems to me the current situation isn't bad, and that there have been fewer complaints this way round, even though I can see it's not ideal.

Liam [ankh]

Liam R. E. Quin 

The best thing about being a slave is not having a mortgage to pay.
Oh, wait... I'm doing this wrong.

On 21/10/16 05:09, Liam R. E. Quin wrote:

A second alternative would be to give the selection tools a sensitivity threshold -- i.e. you must click and drag the cursor a minimum # of screen pixels before the tool will start the drag action.

This might work or might be irritating to people who want to move by one pixel.

AFAIK this is settable in Windows and Linux (5px in the KDE default settings), together with a minimum click-down delay. I don't know if Gimp uses the system's drag notification or if it cooks its own, but anyway because of this people are used to "shake" before dragging on short distances.

I wish we had on-click, on-drag script hooks so that this choice could be scripted. Imagine making the default be to move and use resynthesizer to fill in the missing details!

Me too. Even more if this doesn't impact the mouse response time :)

Without that, seems to me the current situation isn't bad, and that there have been fewer complaints this way round, even though I can see it's not ideal.

The plain click-drag is used fro other things. In ellipse and rectangle selection, this moves the selection mask...

Did someone's email get missed or am I just not seeing it?

--------

From: gimp-user-list on behalf of Ofnuts Sent: Friday, October 21, 2016 4:47 AM To: gimp-user-list@gnome.org
Subject: Re: [Gimp-user] Redesign "move selection"?

AFAIK this is settable in Windows and Linux (5px in the KDE default settings), together with a minimum click-down delay. I don't know if Gimp uses the system's drag notification or if it cooks its own, but anyway because of this people are used to "shake" before dragging on short distances.

Windows Click and drag thresholds aren't (ever?) visibly reconfigurable, you have to edit the system registry to change it. The default threshold is 4px, and GIMP definitely does NOT acknowledge this (click-drag initiates at 1px). Can we bugfile this? And just add it to the long laundry list of Windows OS settings GIMP doesn't respect (Windows native filepicker, Alt to activate the menubar...)

[tangent] ...though to be fair, GIMP uses Alt as a modifier in its own right so having Alt do double duty between modifier key and menubar access is rife with problems (it's actually easy to control whether Alt is used as a modifier or for menu access -- the real problem is writing the logic that decides WHEN the Alt key should cause which response). Besides, I wager most people are used to accessing menus via click/tap anyway; I know I am.

The plain click-drag is used for other things. In ellipse and rectangle selection, this moves the selection mask...

Did it do that in GIMP 2.2 (before the plainclick-and-drag behavior got changed) ? If not then the present behavior actually is more consistent across all select tools, but some alternative to the current behavior would still be nice for those of us who need to move selected content around a lot.

(I also have my own complaints about the Ellipse and Rectangle selects specifically, but let's not go there.)

-- Stratadrake strata_ranger@hotmail.com
--------------------
Numbers may not lie, but neither do they tell the whole truth.

Richard writes:

Oh, boy, THIS subject. Where my workflow is concerned this was the BIGGEST breaking change GIMP ever made -- yes, even bigger than when 2.8 split Save and Export. (And we remember all the complaints over that, right?)

I am one of those where when I no-modifier click and drag a selection my preferred action is to pick up those pixels and move them around (rather than shifting the mask). It is ... a minimum of annoying that we have zero means of configuring GIMP to match our workflow in this respect.

Just so you hear from the other side ...

For me, the new selection tools, where drag moved the selection mask (not its contents) was a huge win. I was forever frustrated at how hard it was to move a selection, especially with ellipse selections where you can't tell when you start dragging where the top left of the ellipse will end up. I remember always having to switch to the Move tool, change mode to "Move selection", drag, change modes back then change tools. I was fairly new then, so maybe there was an easier way via a modifier key that I just never discovered.

I very seldom want to move the contents of the selection. I edit a lot of photos, and on a photo that just leaves a ragged white hole behind. In the rare event that I want to move just part of a transparent layer), it's easy, Select->Float (Shift-Ctrl-L).

I'm not saying Richard is wrong -- I know he's not alone, I've heard enough people who miss the old behavior. Just that for me, the current UI is much better, and that it's a lot easier now to move the selection contents than it used to be to move the selection. If the default ever changes to float-and-move, please include an easy and discoverable way to move the selection mask without needing to change tools or tool options.

A second alternative would be to give the selection tools a sensitivity threshold -- i.e. you must click and drag the cursor a minimum # of screen pixels before the tool will start the drag action. I wonder if this could have solved most of those accidental microadjustments people complained about in GIMP 2.2 without introducing a breaking change....

In my case it had nothing to do with threshold; it was more the lack of an easy, intuitive way to move the mask.

...Akkana