Whither Krita?

[Boudewijn Rempt]

On Wed, 16 Sep 2009, enki wrote:

> What makes MyPaint powerful is that all brush options are combined in 
> one paintops. So for example, you can create a smudge + airbrush + 
> jittering+ pixel pencil preset. Most of mypaint's features are available 
> in Krita, but scattered between different paintops. I think that Brush 
> options should be shared more between paintops. Sensors are a step in 
> the good direction, but more paintops need to use them. That would be a 
> quadruple win :
> - No duplicated code.
> - UI easier to use.
> - Infinite possibilities of creation for the user.
> - Better tablet support for all paintops.

But: it becomes much harder to experiment with new approaches because
all brushes will be a variation of the one big brush engine. Even Corel
Painter now has at least four brush engines (real bristle, ink,
water color and the ordinary one). But fortunately, it's really easy to
create a paintop for krita that uses the mypaint brush directly  :-). 

I'm still liking the idea of having a paintop that is a queue of paintops,
and I think libpaintop is getting nicely powerful, too.

> Keyboard shortcuts is what I miss the most when using Krita. Tablet 
> being an absolute device, you have to make big movements to use the UI. 
> Plus small widgets are hard to click. When you work ten hours on an 
> image, it's frustrating that most of your movements are done for 
> changing settings instead of painting.

I have only one key when I'm sketching: the escape key. But that's not 
a reason for not having much better keyboard support. We really should
improve here, not just for selecting tools, but for modifying color,
paintop settings or zooming in and out.

Unfortunately, it's one area where the integration with KOffice confuses 
the hell out of me.

> Also, keyboard shortcuts permit to adapt the workflow to specific cases 
> even when the UI is not adapted : every actions is at a distance of 1.

...

> I started to write something, but it's far from being finished. I think 
> it should aim at several angle of view.
> who, what media, what formats, normal and extreme uses, variety of 
> techniques used, abolutely needed features vs. "just better" features.

Should be cool to read!

Boudewijn