In article <83ej50524q8fie3hl5ciqsrc1tmgc7e1vp@4ax.com>, pet### [at] vipbg 
says...
> As per my original post, I found a way to avoid some problems I (and I
> know many others) find annoying and wanted to share. As per some other
> posts, which probably don't belong to this thread and maybe not even
> to this group, I would like to find the reasoning behind the current
> GIMP design from a useability point of view, since this is a somewhat
> professional interest of mine. I do not want this to be a PS vs. GIMP
> thread and even less so a flame war - I want to use the best of both
> worlds and I believe I am on my way to doing so.
> 

You know.. One irony here is Paintshop Pro. It uses a system I think 
makes sense. The individual images are contained in a single MDI 
interface as it the toolbar. No need to scramble about trying to figure 
out which one you are working with. Adjustments to the tools, like 
changing opacity or size are handled with floating windows.

Then I try Gimp. Yes, I can position the 'image' window as I like, but 
there is no practical way to tile images, so I can work between them, 
even if there was, it would treat all the other floating windows as 
something to be tiled too. The floating windows are huge compared to the 
very small 'drop down when needed' tools used in PSP, so you can't get 
the damn things almost entirely out of your way if you want to make the 
image window full screen. Changing the magnification scale doesn't help 
matters. Opening a new image causes it to be either the wrong size 
(usually too small) or resizes to fit the image, so it is now not full 
screen anymore, etc..

I don't mind all the floating stuff, except it takes up room it doesn't 
need to when I am not actually using it and you can't get the main image 
window to behave in anything even approaching a sane and usable way as it 
exists. I much prefer PSP. Imho.. If Gimp's main tool window was smaller, 
taking up only the top of the screen, its other gadgets where drop down, 
that just showed the basic title of the toolset, these things remained 
floating on the 'top' of the other windows and Gimp was smart enough to 
'tile' or 'stack' images in the space below the main toolbar (and to not 
screw up the tiling if you zoom in or out on one of the images), I would 
have been quite happy. MDI isn't really necessary for something like 
this, but Gimp's implementation of a purely floating and disjointed 
window system is irritating in the extreme. Even a badly designed MDI 
would be better in many ways.

I agree with someone else's post, the current design is practical with 
more than one display. However, I agree with you that on a single display 
it is far more irritating that useful.

-- 
void main () {

    call functional_code()
  else
    call crash_windows();
}

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