dear gimp experts, i have a question about how to customize gimp.

i don't like the shading that occurs when i am adjusting the cropping boundary. i find it distracting, and it also seems to slow down the dragging operation enough to make it feel jerk-y rather than smooth.

is there any way to disable the shading?

also, i don't like the "corner handles" on the cropping boundary. i find them hard to use. currently the upper left and lower right handles change the frame size, while the upper right and lower left drag the frame at its current size.

i find the corner handles hard to use because often i want to adjust only the horizontal or vertical size, not both. it's a bit tricky to do that with corner handles.

i also find it counter-intuitive that the corner handles don't all behave the same way (some change size, some drag the frame).

what i'd like is to have all four corner handles change the size, and in addition, for each "side" of the boundary to be independently draggable. eg, put a handle at the midpoint of each side of the bounding rectangle that could be dragged in a direction perpendicular to the side. or maybe this could happen anywhere not near the corner, without the need for a handle.

the whole frame could be moved by dragging from an interior point rather than on the frame itself.

is there any way to get a crop/resize frame that behaves this way?

another, possibly related question: often i find it is hard to get fine enough control with my mouse. what i'd like is to be able to get one-pixel motion using the keyboard. for example, when pasting a selection into an existing image, sometimes the exact placement is hard to achieve with a mouse. is there a way to use the arrow keys to move by a pixel at a time?

thanks for your answers.