Better UI for dealing with Clone Layers
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Description

In the discussion of https://phabricator.kde.org/D20314, Dmitry suggested a number of ways to improve users' interaction with Clone Layers:

  1. Implement GUI for changing the source of the clone layer (we wanted to do that for years)
  2. When the user wants to keep the clone, he does the following:

    presses Ctrl+G to group the merged layers

    retargets the clone to this new group

    merges the source layers (the clone is intact, because it is not connected to them)

    More ideas:
  3. show a dialog that "some clone layers are going to be reincarnated into paint layers"
  4. or better just show a floating message

There are a number of ways to implement (1). Some of them are:

  1. Drag & Drop.

    In this implementation, users can drag the intended target layer onto the Clone Layer to make the Clone Layer copy from the target layer. However, I doubt whether this method is intuitive enough for users to use.
  2. Pop-up Dialog

    In this implementation, an action that pops up a dialog is added to the Context Menu in Layer Docker, if the selected layer is a Clone Layer. In this dialog, users can change the source of the Clone Layer. Also, it can also be debated whether this interface is combined into "Layer Properties" dialog, or has its standalone dialog.
  3. Sub-menu in Layer Docker's Context Menu

    In this implementation, a sub-menu is added to the Context Menu in Layer Docker, if the selected layer is a Clone Layer. The sub-menu contains multiple actions that set the source of the Clone Layer to the layer specified by the action.

Methods (2) and (3) sound more user-friendly. (2) requires more clicks and (3) looks more convenient. However, (3) could probably create a extremely long sub-menu. If you actually have a lot of layers (some people I know will have 30 or so), the sub-menu is going to look awful.

tusooaw created this task.Apr 19 2019, 5:27 PM
tusooaw updated the task description. (Show Details)Apr 19 2019, 5:34 PM

Pop-up dialog would be consistent with the behaviour on file layers, and I imagine also the least sensitive to bugs.

Making the option available in the "Layer properties" pop-up is the most intuitive for me. But don't remove all the other options as the "file layer" pop-up does, add to the extra field to the popup instead in case is clone layer :)

dkazakov added a subscriber: dkazakov.EditedApr 20 2019, 8:54 AM

I think a separate dialog for selecting would be the most convenient for the users (option 2). And @vanyossi's idea about merging this dialog with the layer properties is very good. Actually, properties dialog is the most obvious place for the users to search for this option. Though it might be not very easy to add switchable options to it. I guess we could add a pager-widget to it and add pages for custom options like for clone layers and file layers. Though it will be quite a bit of work.

https://invent.kde.org/kde/krita/merge_requests/12

I have made a separate dialog for this purpose. Merging it into Layer Properties is possible, but it could possibly mess up with the ui file, since most of the properties of general layers make sense to Clone Layers (this also holds for File Layers, so actually some settings of File Layers are made more difficult to change).

tusooaw closed this task as Resolved.May 17 2019, 4:40 PM