Much Ado About Everything

In case you don’t know, GIMP is an image editor that strives to compete with Photoshop.  It’s open source and as such free to use, and it’s been around for many years.  If you ask around, it’s well regarded, both in terms of what it does (it’s supposedly very powerful and feature loaded) as well as a success of open source model.

Well, that don’t mean jack, pardon my grammar.  I can’t believe how incredibly annoying that thing is to use!  Never mind annoying, how about extremely unstable?  As in it crashes every five minutes, literally?  A bizzare error message pointing to a problem with font pops up, and after you click on whatever button you want, it simply crashes.  And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Not what you’d expect from something that is supposedly so powerful and has been around for many years.  In fact, I haven’t seen a program this unstable, well, ever!  Excluding various beta software of course.  Not only that, but you lose all of your work, no matter how many changes you made and how many things you changed!  No kidding, really!  You could’ve done a hundred changes to an image, but you’d start with a clean slate, as if nothing ever gets saved to the hard drive!  Unbelievable – for something of this class, that is.  Concept of periodic saves to prevent losing your work just doesn’t exist here?  What the…?

As if that’s not enough, it doesn’t even remember what directory you last opened or saved from!  Or logically assumes that if you open a picture from one directory, that you’d want to save it there too – at least, if you never set the save directory; if you did, it makes sense to use the previous setting.  None of it matters after the crash, it’s all back to the beginning, i.e. clean slate as if program was never run.

Of course, a bit of googling will let you know that this is a “know problem”, and is referenced in FAQ as well.  So what, though?  The solution is not to install a “windows look and feel” part of the GTK library, which is mandatory for GIMP installation – but is a separate package.  Of course, FAQ is out of date and doesn’t label the option in the same way it’s described in the list of options when installing GTK.  At any rate, unchecking win look and feel at installation time does solve the problem.

At least just that one problem.  You see, the first consequence will be that your GIMP will look weird, if you’re running it on windows.  It will look like some old style X11 program.  Ok, maybe not quite so ugly, but it will certainly look out of place.  You’ll just have to live with it though, and it’s not something that would normally bother most people – though people using this program are likely artists and as such will probably be bothered by it.  But never mind that.

It’s just that there’s no end to annoyances.  For example, you open image and try to do something really trivial, such as use a brush and add some strokes to the picture.  You try to change the foreground color, it seems to succed.  Then you try to take a few strokes… and they still paint in black, rather than whatever color you chose!  What the…?  No, its a PNG and no, it’s not black and white or grayscale image.  And no matter how much you try, how much you curse, how much you pound at your keyboard, it’s just never, never going to paint anything but black!  Even if you change it to background color (i.e. white), it’s STILL going to only draw black!  Un-be-lievable!  What the hell is wrong with this thing?

Then you try to be clever and decide to just forget about that image and do a simple cut and paste into a brand new one – because using brush on a brand new image does seem to work properly.  So you cut and paste – for example, selecting by color, which is indeed a very clever and intuitive way to do selections, and one that is sorely lacking everywhere else.  Then you paste it, after creating a new image (there is no paste into new, as far as I know, but never mind that) – and having to type manually new pixel size, which again should be assumed to be the paste size automatically – and maybe it does, but not when you really need it.  Or whatever, that’s small compared to what comes next…

And that is, the image you just pasted, you cannot do any friggin’ thing with!  Really, no kidding, the canvas just doesn’t let you do any operation to it!  Incredible, isn’t it?  Try as you might, to unselect, click left or right, double click on the (still outlined for some reason) selection, double click outside the selection, click or double click on just about any part – and not part – of image, window, screen, whatever; pressing escape, trying to choose unselect in the menu, you name it.  Nothing works!  What on Earth is wrong with this stupid thing?  A simple cut and paste operation – or a simple brush stroke operation – which are both the most basic of the operations required for even the most basic of image editors – doesn’t work!!  I could not believe my eyes!

After many, many attempts, I finally found out one thing that worked.  Select “new layer” option from the layer menu.  Why a new layer when I’m doing paste!  It’s implicit that I want a new layer (maybe not but I haven’t seen an option for that either) and besides a new layer is already there, in the list, appropriately named with “paste from selection” or something.  But you can’t do anything to it and, worse, you can’t do anything to any other layer either!  You cannot change layer, you cannot  use any tools, you cannot do almost anything, except luckily for undo of that paste.  Intuitive?  Not in the slightest!  I don’t know which century did the author – or authors – of this “feature” or the whole program came from, but I’ve never in my life seen a less intuitive program.  Well maybe I did see even stranger stuff, that just didn’t work in any normal frame of mind.  But this doesn’t fall too short of that dubious achievement.  And this is supposed to be one of the jewels of open source and not some obscure little program.

Disappointing?  That doesn’t cover it.  Enraging would be the better word.  Yes, it’s free.  But if it gets me to the point where I get so disturbed that I have to yell at computer, call the author names, and pound at keyboard, then the “free” ain’t worth squat protecting them from litigation.  Just because it’s free doesn’t give someone right to mess with your health.  No, I’m not going to sue and get nominated for Darwin Award (can you do something stupid and live, and still be considered for it?  I thought you needed to die in order to qualify).  But the very fact that I can see some merit in that idea should give authors a pause.  What I really want to do is be able to yell at them: “idiots!!”.  If you’re going to change things that work a certain way in hundreds of programs, you better be reinventing the wheel, creating a new paradigm or something.  I don’t care if it’s free or not, being different just to be “cool” – reserve that for when you’re going to a bar to meet new faces, not for something that tens or hundreds of thousands of people are going to use (or at least try to).  Being different is not always good.