K1TesseraEna wrote:
... but I am about to make a statement here - navigating gimp menus the old way is a part of learning process.
It may be part of the learning process, but it can interfere with the creative process.
When I am working on a project, any time I have to spend searching for
how to do something is an obstacle to my actually doing it. The smaller the obstacle to discovering how to do something, the more productive I can be.
I have been using GIMP for nearly 15 years now (though the first few years were spent trying to draw a straight line
![Smile :)](./images/smilies/icon_smile.gif)
) and I still spend entirely too much time running my mouse through the menus looking for a particular command. Yes, I should use the Plug-in Browser; and I usually do,
after I've gone through all of the Filters submenus looking for Gradient Map (as an example). And in this case the Plug-in Browser proves quite helpful... instructing me that the Gradient Map filter can be found in the "Colors->Map" submenu (no wonder I didn't find it under Filters).
OK, now that I've found it in the Plug-in Browser, why should I have to now close the dialog and manually navigate to "Colors->Map->Gradient Map" to execute the command? Computers are
supposed to be facilitating such things, and yet I am now a good half dozen steps away from actually performing the operation that I knew I wanted to perform, I just could not remember how.
Being able to click on a "Perform" button in the Plug-in Browser to automate execution of the found command would seem to me a reasonable option, but even then the Plug-in Browser only shows plug-ins -- it doesn't show tools (e.g., Curves or Posterize) and it doesn't show core operations (such as "Select->Save to Channel"). Furthermore, it only returns results if I actually know the name of the command (or at least part of it).
To me, this Action Search dialog offers a vastly improved method of discovery of GIMP operations and provides for a much smoother workflow. There has been a lot of controversy over it but I think most of that is owing to a breakdown in communication and misunderstanding of what is being proposed.