As I understand it, one reason for the design of the Gimp spinbox is to make it easier to use with a graphics tablet stylus - hence the dragging of the bar. Personally I find it awkward to use whether with a mouse or a stylus, and particularly dislike the problems with dragging from the right that you mentioned. As for accidentally setting blur to 100% when trying to focus the text at the right... that's the bane of my Inkscape life! I would love to see them replaced with something else.

* Do you want the progress bar?

I do like the presence of the progress bar. It provides immediate feedback that plain numbers don't. If the box says 9, is that 9 out of 10 or 9 out of 100? A progress bar immediately gives you a sense of scale.

• If so, should it be the full height of the widget (quite a bit more

complicated)?

I don't necessarily think it should be full height, but it should be clear and obvious. It should also be clear that it's a progress bar, not an underline or other decoration - so perhaps also ensure the "unfilled" portion of the bar is visible.

* Do you want to be able to drag the bar? With one/two methods?

Dragging the bar is a nice feature which makes the widget a lot more immediate to use - great for just playing around.

I don't like the current two-method implementation, as I often end up activating the wrong one. That said, there are definite advantages to allowing both coarse and fine control. Perhaps some other approach could be used to still provide that capability - here are some possibilities off the top of my head:

* Make the amount of change proportional to the speed of the pointer movement, so that fast drags make coarse changes, whilst slow drags provide fine adjustment.

* Once the mouse button is held down, use left/right movements for coarse and up/down movements for fine adjustments.

* Left mouse button for coarse changes, right for fine. (Perhaps not so great for tablet users)

• Any other changes?

* One great feature in many Inkscape spinboxes is the context menu to let you select from a list of pre-defined values. The Gimp spinboxes lack these. Ideally I'm sure you would want a means for the developer to provide specific values (with comments), but having a standard fallback that lists, say, 10 evenly spaced values would be useful.

* The ability to do basic maths in Inkscape spinboxes is another useful feature that the Gimp ones lack.

* Mousewheel support almost goes without saying. But I'm saying it anyway, just in case ;)

* When dragging with the left button, clicking the right one should cancel the change and revert back to the previous value.

Regards,

Mark

Hi Tav,

oh, I never noticed the two different modes... lol. I've always found it annoying that it is so hard to set values in 0.1 steps, which I needed frequently (my blurred objects are usually small, such as shadows behind a text) - while it has already been possible.

I've always thought I had to use the numeric entry field for that fine-tuning (and found that field pretty annoying, when I accidentally clicked too much to the left and got 100% blur, taking long to render and freezing Inkscape for some time before I can continue to work). Having that field outside the slider would be useful.

Perhaps if scrolling with mouse-wheel meant 'fine-tune', dragging meant 'quick change' and clicking meant 'here', that could be good?

Currently, that thin strip of a bar is indeed difficult to see. It doesn't necessarily need to fill the whole height, but a little more height would make it easier on the eyes - the bars are really tiny already. (Screenshot attached for those who don't have a copy of the current development version installed)

Can you post a screenshot or gif of the default widget with /without progress bar?

Maren

P.S.: and can someone fix the filter area in master before anyone thinks of releasing 0.93? It's much too small and cuts off parts of the object, making blur kind of useless to non-experienced users, when they would always need to fix the area in the filter editor...

Am 04.12.2017 um 13:53 schrieb Tavmjong Bah:

Hi,

I've been looking into replacing the Gimp Spin Slider widget (e.g Blur/Opacity in the Fill and Stroke dialog). The widget is licensed under GPLv3 and is the only reason Inkscape as a whole is licensed under GPLv3 rather GPLv2.. The board sometime ago agree that being a GPLv2 program was desirable (I don't remember the exact reasoning).

A normal Gtk Spin Slider (aka Gtk::SpinButton) has an option to show the "progress" of slider, that is the percentage (defined in some arbitrary way) between a minimum and maximum value. This in Gtk 2 is shown as a solid blue bar with width proportional to the value that covers the widget from top to bottom. In Gtk 3 the solid blue bar is replaced by a thin blue bar at the bottom of the widget.

As far as I can tell, the Gimp version of the slider makes three changes:

1. It allows for a label inside the widget. This is a nice space saving

feature. The widget handles changing the label text from black to white as the progress bar moves across the label.

2. It allows for a non-uniform scale by adding a "gamma" factor.

3. It adds the ability to drag the progress bar to change the value. If

one drags from the top (down arrow cursor) the change follows the cursor directly. If one drags along the bottom half (double headed cursor) the change is finer and relative to the current value.

I've always found that dragging the progress bar to be a bit awkward. One problem is that one can not start the drag at the far right of the widget as that area is reserved for typing a value directly in. Also, the different functionality of starting the drag in the top of the widget vs. the bottom of the widget is confusing.

Since I am rewriting this widget, I can adjust it to what people want:

• Do you want the progress bar?

• If so, should it be the full height of the widget (quite a bit more

complicated)?

• Do you want to be able to drag the bar? With one/two methods?

• Any other changes?

Thanks,

Tav

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