[I want to preface this conversation by reminding everyone that we’re in the beta period for Krita 5.0 already, so it’s unlikely that any user interface stuff will change in the short term. For the most part, the way things are right now are the way they will end up being in 5.0.]
(@raghukamath Thanks for the notification. I’m late because I just don’t check KA as much as I should, considering how popular it has become!)
@EyeOdin my suggestion would be just to tweak it a bit so it is more at the center like this
This has been suggested before, as that’s the way Blender does it.
I’m not against it exactly, but it’s kind inconsistent with the rest of Krita’s design language. Since we don’t have a lot of centered GUI in Krita, it wasn’t something that we originally considered.
@Tom I’m still not sure how I feel about certain settings being put behind a dropdown and certain buttons being removed
Well, I’m not 100% sure about it either, but the general philosophy behind the design was:
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Put the things that people use most frequently out front (where they can be easily seen, recognized and used), and tidy the things that are used less frequently into a shared space (thus decreasing the visual clutter and noise associated with constantly showing people buttons that they don’t want to press). This is the same logic that most people use in their kitchen, garage and office–the stuff we use all the time might be on the desk or countertop, while the stuff that we only break out for certain uses is put away in a drawer or cupboard.
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Buttons and widgets that are there should be continually useful. (I.E.: Instead of doing nothing during the playing state, the play button
becomes a pause button
. Instead of doing nothing during the stopped state, the stop button
moves the cursor back to the first frame. Instead of doing nothing when you’re at the last frame of your animation, the next frame
button should estimate where you’ll want to place another frame and jump ahead.) We could have unique buttons for all of those concepts, but Eoin and I want a button to almost always do something useful when clicked. Maybe we could do better conveying that visually in the future, but we also run the risk of making the symbology more complicated and less clear.
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Space is a finite resource. We have already had to make concessions and adjustments to reduce the footprint of the titlebar GUI on the Animation Curves Docker, because we have users running relatively low resolution displays who have run into problems with docker layout. It’s easy to look at Krita on a 1440p or 4K display and think of the GUI as a vast expanse of free space, but at 1080p and lower I think it starts to become clear that we need to optimize for space. In the same vein, the idea is that we also have room to grow and add other useful widgets in the future.
Of course, these are all totally subjective and we can debate or discuss each of them. But those are the main reasons why things are the way they are right now (and will be that way in Krita 5.0 too). I think when Krita 5.0 comes out we will get a good idea of whether people agree with my design philosophy or not. 
@ogonek I’d really prefer to have the autokey menu next to the add/remove keyframe buttons.
How often do you actually find yourself switching autokey mode, because for me I find that whether I want to use autokey (and what mode) is mainly dependent on the subject/type of animation that I’m working on? It could be that our workflow is very different, so maybe I’m just not seeing it.
And I change the end and start frame all the time, that’s no set and forget to me, especially when I am testing out timing etc… Selection loop is also really nice. But I find it quite cumbersome to actually do a selection.
This makes it sound like you’re using the start and end settings as a sort of workaround, while the real issue is that you find it cumbersome to make selections. If that’s the case, I’d much rather try to improve how we handle making selections on the timeline than move more widgets into the high-traffic area.
Feature request:
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make it so that it is possible to drag across the top line (where the frame numbers are) to select all visible unlocked frames below. (like in blender)
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for better screenspace economy please let me decrease the number of accessible onion layer slots, so that I can squeeze that window a little tighter. I rarely use all -10 to +10 onions.
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make the cloned frames have a different shade
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zoom/pan shortcuts to work on the timeline if cursor is hovering there (like in blender)
1, 2, and 4. May be possible, I’ll look into it.
- Can you be more specific? Would it help if they were lighter or darker? Broader stripes or a different pattern? (Keep in mind that we can’t do much with color because we already have color labels for keyframes as well as accessibility considerations.)
sorry for the slightly off topic stuff, is there a dedicated thread for animation development topics/ feature requests?
I don’t actually know… I should! But I don’t…