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[Torbjorn]

Gimpusers.com reports that  layer groups will be available in 2.8:
http://www.gimpusers.com/news/2009-09-06/layer-groups-gimp-2-8-preview-update.html

And also that the developers may change the UI to a single window UI:
http://www.gimpusers.com/news/2009-09-06/gimp-2-8-single-window.html

They also have an article showing the new features of 2.8:
http://www.gimpusers.com/tutorials/gimp-2-8-new-features.html

I must say that I am really looking forward to this release.

[monoceros84]

Thanks for that link. It sounds great and I have learned some useful stuff that is already in my 2.7 version and that I haven't noticed.

layer grouping - great great great, finally! I will use it right away. And as mentioned, the best is, we have it already and don't have to wait until 2.8

calculations in text fields - nice feature, I have to pull my calculator very often

vector layers - sounds very interesting. Let's see how this works out but it might be a perfect tool.

new hotkeys - we have already discussed this and not all of them make me happy. But I will get used to it. But one thing annoys me: Why isn't there a hotkey to show the layer mask? It's one of my most important steps. I can Ctrl-click the mask to enable/ disable it. But I can't e.g. Shift-click it to show the mask. It should be so easy to include and it would make my life so much easier Or have I missed something, is it already in there?

The rest is not of the greatest importance to me (apart from the GEGL inclusion but that of cause will not touch us until 3.0)...

[Rolf]

Great news - I pulled this to the front page.

[nachbarnebenan]

Here is a screenshot of the current development version. The mouse is over the new add layer group button and I already created some groupings. They can even be nested. The gui is still the old one, which is very good. Sorry I didn't use a better photo, but I was in quite a hurry...

[guillaume65]

Gimpusers.com points to a  fresh new article on the new UI:

http://www.mmiworks.net/eng/publications/2009/09/gimp-single-mode.html

Wim

[Rolf]

This is a cool article - I'll pull it to the blog.

[mramshaw]

I was initially kind of unhappy about this. I set up a multi-monitor arrangement so I could have
the main Gimp window on my good colour-corrected monitor, with all the other stuff on my work
monitor. I don't use multi-monitor for anything else. On the other hand, with the nVidia drivers
(not that things are any better on Windows) it's never been an entirely workable arrangement.

As things stand now I usually use a floating window (with everything tools-related in it) which I
close and re-open a lot (would be nice if I could do this with Alt-Tab or some other shortcut). For
anything graphics-related I think you want everything as big as the monitor will support, so a lot
of the other stuff makes no sense to me.

[nachbarnebenan]

Ok, although I don't like it that much, this is how it works and looks. The warning about it still being experimental are not overstated. It will crash.

[Rolf]

Thanks for sharing the screenshots! Quite hot, I just read yesterday that it was implemented in a hack.

I don't like it too - only for screencasting it can be nice. Where do dialogs pop up if you have the window not maximized?  This is my main problem whilc recording - the dialogues pop up outside the recording area.

[nachbarnebenan]

>only for screencasting it can be nice. Where do dialogs pop up if you have the window not maximized?

Atm it doesn't look as if this has changed. New dialogs still pop up as separate windows.

The screenshot also shows the images thumbnail bar, although I'm not sure of it's usefulness. It takes up precious screenspace and the images dockable dialog can serve the same function.

[Rolf]

I just pulled your image to the front page.

Question: When your window is not maximised, where does the pop up pops up? Outside of the window?

[nachbarnebenan]

> When your window is not maximised, where does the pop up pops up? Outside of the window?

Good question. Since I'm (ab)using kwin's window roles quite a bit I'm not sure where they are supposed to appear. Standard new window placing rule should put them somewhere about one third from the top left corner of the parent window, in single window mode that puts them right where the navigation window can be seen (I haven't moved it). So it would be safe for recording, but please don't hold me to it.

Btw, in the viewing menu there is an entry "Display Filters" which is useful but I'd recommend not to use right away. First remove the gegl high quality setting from my script, as it seems to cause problems with the thumbnails anyway (it doesn't seem like all thumbnails get redrawn for every change, but Gimp still gets very slow with gegl activated - both in view and color menu - if more than one image is opened). Hmm, and maybe I should made a different screenshot with a less political image on it…

[pawel]

I'm too tired and lazy to read all the posts in this thread now, but I would like to just comment that I'm thrilled that Gimp goes single-window! The multi-window layout has always been the one odd thing that irritated me a bit about Gimp, after I'd ditched Windows and Photoshop for good - the necessity to look for and select another window to do any action on the current image has been a bit of a pain, even after I've reduced the number of windows to 2. I've since got used to this atypical layout, but it's going to be nice to be able to switch to one window (and see if I still miss it .