rectangle select tool
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| rectangle select tool | William Skaggs | 11 Jun 01:40 |
| rectangle select tool | GSR - FR | 11 Jun 18:24 |
| rectangle select tool | Frédéric | 11 Jun 18:53 |
| rectangle select tool | Jakub Steiner | 12 Jun 16:54 |
| rectangle select tool | Jakub Steiner | 12 Jun 16:55 |
| rectangle select tool | William Skaggs | 12 Jun 17:41 |
rectangle select tool
Okay, the old rectangle select tool has finally been removed from cvs and the new, adjustable, one has taken its place. It is hopefully in something very close to its final form now.
The "rectangle tool" project has been a rather long and quite cooperative effort. I started it, using the old crop tool as the take-off point; Edhel took over and rewrote the code completely, turning it into an "interface" and converting the crop and ellipse tools to use it; Neo provided guidance and feedback all along; Mitch provided advice and lots of bug-fixes; and I came back at the end to wrap up a few loose ends.
I won't say anything about how to use the new rectangle select tool here, because it is supposed to be intuitive and discoverable -- to the extent that it behaves contrary to your expectations, that is probably a bug. There are however just a couple of things worth noting:
1) The Shift and Control keys are no longer usable to constrain the rectangle to be square, and to expand from a center-point. Instead there are tool options that do these things. The overloading of Shift and Control was always difficult to deal with in the old tool, and in the new tool with movable edges, it turned out to be completely impossible.
2) You will probably get a "GIMP-critical" error the first time you run cvs-gimp after this change, because it tries to restore the toolbox to its previous state and finds that one of the tools it is looking for does not exist. This is not a crasher (at least for me), and it should only happen once, so just ignore it.
If you find something that is broken or doesn't seem to work right from this point, please file a Bugzilla report.
-- Bill
______________ ______________ ______________ ______________
Sent via the CNPRC Email system at primate.ucdavis.edu
rectangle select tool
Hi,
weskaggs@primate.ucdavis.edu (2006-06-10 at 1640.09 -0700):
1) The Shift and Control keys are no longer usable to constrain the rectangle to be square, and to expand from a center-point. Instead there are tool options that do these things. The overloading of Shift and Control was always difficult to deal with in the old tool, and in the new tool with movable edges, it turned out to be completely impossible.
So now there is no fast way, only one that involves extra movements with extra clicks? From user pov, that is a step backwards, sorry to say.
GSR
rectangle select tool
On Sunday 11 June 2006 18:24, GSR - FR wrote:
1) The Shift and Control keys are no longer usable to constrain the rectangle to be square, and to expand from a center-point. Instead there are tool options that do these things. The overloading of Shift and Control was always difficult to deal with in the old tool, and in the new tool with movable edges, it turned out to be completely impossible.
So now there is no fast way, only one that involves extra movements with extra clicks? From user pov, that is a step backwards, sorry to say.
IMHO, the possibility to move edges is a big step forward, and losing the shortcut for center and square is a very small price to pay.
Bill, after making a selection, switching to another tool, and then go back to rectangle select tool, the guides are gone, and there is no way to move the edges anymore. Do you think there is a possibility to add such feature ?
rectangle select tool
Hi.
I see the hard work you've put into this. I'm happy to see you learn your way around GIMP codebase. I like the cooperation effort involved. But expect some harsh reactions from existing userbase.
Personally you're making me change a process that I've learned and practiced in the past 6 years. During that time I've probably used the selection tools many more times more often than I've been outside I'm affraid[1]. But I'll bite the lip and will try my best to throw this all away.
Initially I thought getting rid of the aspect lock modifier may be a bit harsh. But maybe I just need to test this for a month and we'll see. There may be another solution to the "same modifier for adding and aspect ratio contrain" problem than you chose.
The bezier selection is now very similar in behavior with the new selection tools. You tweak a shape first and then apply it to form a regular marching ants selection. In bezier selections tool you use the modifiers to add to or substract from existing selection when _applying_ the selection (pressing Alt+Enter or Alt+Click Inside to subtract, Shift +Enter or Shift+Click inside to add...). You don't press the modifiers before you start defining the shape. Using this for these selection tools as well would from my point of view avoid the shortcut clash problem.
On the other hand, rectangular and elliptical selections in cvs HEAD are active even before they are applied. Maybe that's a good thing. Although I found it a little distracting when I had an existing selection and tweaking the new one "blinked through" the old one. Kinda similarly confusing as the dual-use modifiers ;) But perhaps it's just a bug.
If you go for shift+drag for adding new selection behavior as it is now in cvs HEAD, allow me to start the drag over an existing selection "in progress". Currently that starts editing it as if I didn't hold shift.
There's also something I think would make the tool more usable. The cursor changing bounds are image-resolution-bound, not view-resolution-bound. I work with 22x22px canvases. Even when I'm zoomed in, no selection I make shows the "apply selection" cursor in the center as the selection border takes all the space every time. The feedback I'm given is that I cannot apply the selection in progress by clicking inside.
It's too early to tell if I can get used to this new behavior. Even though the immidiate reaction was "dang give me my tools back!" I see the benefit for a lot of casual GIMP users. It probably was a serious-enough problem to require routine users and Photoshop converts to forget and learn something new.
P.S.: I also noticed the selections are broken when modified with a keyboard. The marching ants nor the final selection reflect to the keyboard-set position.
[1] Sad, sad life I'm living.
rectangle select tool
Hi.
I see the hard work you've put into this. I'm happy to see you learn your way around GIMP codebase. I like the cooperation effort involved. But expect some harsh reactions from existing userbase.
Personally you're making me change a process that I've learned and practiced in the past 6 years. During that time I've probably used the selection tools many more times more often than I've been outside I'm affraid[1]. But I'll bite the lip and will try my best to throw this all away.
Initially I thought getting rid of the aspect lock modifier may be a bit harsh. But maybe I just need to test this for a month and we'll see. There may be another solution to the "same modifier for adding and aspect ratio contrain" problem than you chose.
The bezier selection is now very similar in behavior with the new selection tools. You tweak a shape first and then apply it to form a regular marching ants selection. In bezier selections tool you use the modifiers to add to or substract from existing selection when _applying_ the selection (pressing Alt+Enter or Alt+Click Inside to subtract, Shift +Enter or Shift+Click inside to add...). You don't press the modifiers before you start defining the shape. Using this for these selection tools as well would from my point of view avoid the shortcut clash problem.
On the other hand, rectangular and elliptical selections in cvs HEAD are active even before they are applied. Maybe that's a good thing. Although I found it a little distracting when I had an existing selection and tweaking the new one "blinked through" the old one. Kinda similarly confusing as the dual-use modifiers ;) But perhaps it's just a bug.
If you go for shift+drag for adding new selection behavior as it is now in cvs HEAD, allow me to start the drag over an existing selection "in progress". Currently that starts editing it as if I didn't hold shift.
There's also something I think would make the tool more usable. The cursor changing bounds are image-resolution-bound, not view-resolution-bound. I work with 22x22px canvases. Even when I'm zoomed in, no selection I make shows the "apply selection" cursor in the center as the selection border takes all the space every time. The feedback I'm given is that I cannot apply the selection in progress by clicking inside.
It's too early to tell if I can get used to this new behavior. Even though the immidiate reaction was "dang give me my tools back!" I see the benefit for a lot of casual GIMP users. It probably was a serious-enough problem to require routine users and Photoshop converts to forget and learn something new.
P.S.: I also noticed the selections are broken when modified with a keyboard. The marching ants nor the final selection reflect to the keyboard-set position.
[1] Sad, sad life I'm living.
rectangle select tool
Jimmac,
Thanks for your detailed, thoughtful, and very helpful critique.
I see the hard work you've put into this. I'm happy to see you learn your way around GIMP codebase. I like the cooperation effort involved. But expect some harsh reactions from existing userbase.
Well, my experience has always been that changing *anything* in the UI of an application, no matter how broken, leads to harsh reactions from users who have learned to exploit the breakage -- so it won't come as a surprise. This is not intended to be dismissive of complaints -- the whole effort was largely driven by complaints -- but just to point out that it is never possible to make everybody copletely happy.
The bezier selection is now very similar in behavior with the new selection tools. You tweak a shape first and then apply it to form a regular marching ants selection. In bezier selections tool you use the modifiers to add to or substract from existing selection when _applying_ the selection (pressing Alt+Enter or Alt+Click Inside to subtract, Shift +Enter or Shift+Click inside to add...). You don't press the modifiers before you start defining the shape. Using this for these selection tools as well would from my point of view avoid the shortcut clash problem.
First: the new tools actually used to work the way you describe, and the behavior was changed in response to complaints from users (including you, iirc!) who wanted to be able to do things like sweep out a rectangle and then hit Ctrl-C to copy the contents without remembering to click inside the rectangle first; etc. It would be easy to change it back, but the current behavior seems to be more appealing to most people.
Second: for me personally, I am generally opposed to overloading modifiers. It allows speedups for experienced users, but really messes with the minds of new users. I think there is a better solution to this problem: to allow GIMP to make use of a new modifier key (call it TOOL), and dedicate TOOL-modified keystrokes exclusively to controlling tool behavior. Then you could, for example, toggle the aspect constraint by hitting 'TOOL-s' or something. But this is a topic best discussed in depth elsewhere.
On the other hand, rectangular and elliptical selections in cvs HEAD are active even before they are applied. Maybe that's a good thing. Although I found it a little distracting when I had an existing selection and tweaking the new one "blinked through" the old one. Kinda similarly confusing as the dual-use modifiers ;) But perhaps it's just a bug.
It is intentional. I think after you get used to it, it is actually helpful in many cases, but if too many people find it confusing, it can be changed.
If you go for shift+drag for adding new selection behavior as it is now in cvs HEAD, allow me to start the drag over an existing selection "in progress". Currently that starts editing it as if I didn't hold shift.
Good point. I will change this.
There's also something I think would make the tool more usable. The cursor changing bounds are image-resolution-bound, not view-resolution-bound. I work with 22x22px canvases. Even when I'm zoomed in, no selection I make shows the "apply selection" cursor in the center as the selection border takes all the space every time. The feedback I'm given is that I cannot apply the selection in progress by clicking inside.
Ah, that's a bug. I'll fix it.
It's too early to tell if I can get used to this new behavior. Even though the immidiate reaction was "dang give me my tools back!" I see the benefit for a lot of casual GIMP users. It probably was a serious-enough problem to require routine users and Photoshop converts to forget and learn something new.
I guess the question, in the long run, is how often you find yourself happy to be able to modify an existing selection, versus how often you find yourself thinking that what you are doing would have been easier the old way. Every change is a tradeoff: I hope this one is a good tradeoff overall, but only time will tell.
P.S.: I also noticed the selections are broken when modified with a keyboard. The marching ants nor the final selection reflect to the keyboard-set position.
I will investigate, and fix any problems I can find.
Thanks again for your feedback,
-- Bill
______________ ______________ ______________ ______________
Sent via the CNPRC Email system at primate.ucdavis.edu
