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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 8th, 2023

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  • Sometimes I look at the memes around here and wonder wtf y’all are doing. Like, neither my code nor the code at the place I work at are perfect. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen a merge do this. Maybe some of the most diverged merges temporarily had a lot of errors because of some refactoring, but then it was just a few find + replaces away from being fixed again. But those were merges where multiple teams had been working on both the original and the fork for years and even then it was usually pretty okay.





  • You call it “quick to judge and superficial”, but imo that’s the wrong attitude. Every tool we use as humans should be designed to be as intuitive as possible. It makes it easiest for people to learn how to use a new tool. That doesn’t mean that a tool cannot be complex or customizable, but the default experience should make it easy for new users to quickly achieve something. Once they grow accustomed to the tool they can tailor it their own way.

    No tool has to do this, but if it wants to be widely used then this is kinda necessary.

    There’s a reason why there are whole fields of study into human media interaction, and why software companies hire UI designers. Everything that doesn’t have to be explained in words and text because it is intuitive saves mental overhead for the user and makes the application more accessible.



  • Can, but not by default. The default setup is what leaves an impression on most users. Most users opening GIMP for the first time expect to be able to find stuff that they need, not have to first spend a lot of time getting familiar with all of its options. It shouldn’t be needed to first spend time opening all the sane default windows and re-aliging stuff every time you boot it for the first time. At least, that shouldn’t be the case of GIMP wants to be as popular with non-technical users like Krita is.

    Also, the tool bar still doesn’t have the nice separations between tool functions, and it still feel a bit more chaotic. Not sure of it’s the icons or the order.


  • Now admittedly I’m not someone who often uses drawing programs, but my biggest issue in GIMP is that I never seem to be able to find what I’m looking for.

    In the two images you posted you can actually see an example of such a case. In Krita all the tools (or whatever you’d call them) in the bar on the left are ordered in a logical way, and separate types of tools are also visually separated by separator lines. The bar with tools is also only 2 icons wide, which makes scanning for the right tool a bit easier, since you can mostly just scan along the vertical axis. In GIMP it’s just a pile of low contrast icons in seemingly random order. Unless you’ve used it enough to know the order, you’re gonna have to do a lot more searching. And searching will be way harder since you’ll have to search horizontally and vertically.

    It’s like reading a website where the text is taking the whole with of the screen and without paragraphs (GIMP) vs reading a website where the line length is constrained, the text is horizontally centered, and there are proper paragraphs.

    I feel like this example reflects my personal experience with both. I’ve used quite a few different types of image editing programs, and with most of them I can fairly easily find the stuff I need. Using GIMP however, I used to be quite lost. Nowadays it’s gotten better because the windows are not all floating around and I’ve used it more. But still, I only found Krita after using a fair bit of GIMP, and yet I felt instantly more at home because the UI was easier to navigate.

    Edit: That being said, GIMP is a very cool program. I don’t want to hate on it too much. It’s helped me countless times. The UI has already improved a lot since the floaty window days, and I hope that continues.


  • Do people really constantly copy-paste code? If I don’t know something I’ll look it up, but then I’ll read the answer and apply it to the code I’m writing rather than copying it directly. I rarely see a piece of code that I can copy over directly into what I’m doing, and even if I can it’s usually not thr best idea because the naming etc would be inconsistent