Beautiful work @Rakurri. Yes, I too agree that all those changes would make the UI much better. I would even go a step further and remove all the duplicates/redundancies (as someone else already said on this forum) like these:
And yes, that white line!!! That single white line is one of the main reasons the UI doesn’t look better.
@fullerhill_art In my humble opinion, Krita is different than Blender. Blender’s interface serves specific 3D workflows and I’m afraid that being too much inspired by it might turn the Krita canvas (which, in my opinion, must remain as minimal as possible) populated with shinny and colourful icons that would distract from the artwork.
Either way, awesome discussion! The UI is the first contact we have with a software and using it everyday makes it a tiny bit of us, users. So, I believe it is one very important improvement to make. But that’s just my opinion
like I can help out making elements if there is need to be used.
I just need to see the original ones Qt uses to replace them if they work like that.
to my experience style sheets work very poorly from OS to OS as the scale of letters and box pixels are different.
How ever the cool thing about Qt is that you can make your own versions of a given class as you can replace everything you want on it and just replace the things you don’t want and instead have the look and feel you desire.
You just need to know the look you want to head into.
You have a good point there, which I’ve been considering too.
While it’s good to try and ‘synchronise’ OSS UI’s so that users can integrate free programs into their respective pipelines, it’s also important to delineate the ways Krita differs from Blender.
In this case minimalism is a strong contributor to how Krita can be used efficiently. Perhaps a tie-in to Blender may be specific Docker icons? This could help to familiarise users with the purpose of the Docker. And maybe the Docker sidebar can be discarded if it distracts from the main canvas…
The toolbox icons don’t need colouring in my view, but I’ll still test out ideas that you guys request anyway.
Awesome! I’ve been trying to learn Qt the past few days, but it’s good to have support from users already familiar with the program.
I guess there would need to be more consensus on what the toolbox might include before we try it out in Qt? I don’t know how this could be coordinated…
I know this might be a very unpopular opinion what I am about to say since Krita comes from the KDE work enviroment, but I think Qt hinders Krita more than you might expect.
I worked a bit with it and it is cool that it makes quick and easy menus, but if you want to go outside of it’s bounds it quickly becomes a burden. I really found it odd once I came to Krita and made a bit of python that there was no API for the menus and it was all carried by Qt. Usually it was the first thing I learnt when I did python in Maya and Blender once I started working on it. Here Qt is just like something that is out of you hand you know and another barrier to entry.
Another unpopular opinion that I have is that the best UI API I have come across until now is actually Maya’s MEL scripting (for how bad Maya might be it has many good points and for a reason). Qt with PyQt5 is by far more complicated and convoluted as it does not speak “Krita” however it has restrictions of its own super imposed on it.
Just my thoughts I don’t mean anything about it. I know there is a bunch of stuff I don’t see on the back stage.
I am more familiar with PyQt5 and QtDesigner than Qt with QtCreator, itself because I was more inclined to be in Python than in C++. Though the idea to shift to C++ has gone through my mind several times when I was in Krita (but my computer hates Linux, don’t ask me why it just refuses too). But I am finally in blender now so more Python for me.
But after learnning QtDesigner I did start to have alot of UI ideas 8|
I even had though in fooling around with the UI files to adjust some stuff, but i dont know any better really.
Another Idea I had was to remake the Animation Docker as a new addon to not be as bulky just because of the UI but that is already being done.
by the way if you want to test UI ideas quickly you can use a blank addon I did for Krita. it really has nothing on it and does nothing … but if you change the UI file and restart Krita you can see the buttons and widgets straight away. https://github.com/EyeOdin/blank
I made it for testing purposes or to start a new docker since it uses the same code to kick in.
oh no there is no coding involved for this…
just drag and drop the widgets save the .ui file and start Krita.
that docker loads the .ui file directly after it comes out of QtDesigner you dont even need to convert it into a .py file.
but if you want to acctually change the look of the widgets heavily you will then to edit the .py file with code in order to change the element look.
on my last addon I did I just placed a bunch of empty widgets and built most functions with the code and changed things from there, since it depended on the user input to show one thing or another.
but with this addon you can quickly see why Qt is good for making universal UIs and see the classes and options available for each as everything is open from the get go in QtDesigner.
Under Linux/BSD (or Cygwin for windows users) for whom like to use command line… Otherwise, “standard computer’s users” and especially windows users, may be completely lost with usual gnu command line tools
Yes yes YES! That looks super good Oliver!! I would love for that! Even just removing the duplicate name would improve it a ton! Yours also make more space for the colour wheel
Yeah I too get skeptical of Qt every time something in Krita “can’t be changed because of Qt”.
The UI is peoples first impression of a program. It is insanely important. The first time I downloaded Krita many years back, I uninstalled it rather quick because I didn’t like the look of the UI in comparison to the program I was using back then (Photoshop). The UI design keeps a lot of people away from trying it out and giving it the chance it deserves. There have been multiple times I have shown Krita to someone and they react negatively to the UI, which makes me sad, because Krita is fantastic. Artists are often visual people, and the visuals of their program can play a large part in picking what program they are going to use. Blender got insane amounts of new users when they changed their UI, and I think Krita would see the same thing happen if they changed theirs. (Of course, Blender had a lot going for it, but certainly the new sleek UI must have been a large part of it.) Krita is my favorite drawing application! That is why I want the UI to be as good as it can get, since I am going to look at it every day!
Dude you would not even Believe! I know a DIE HARD 3DS MAX user that got converted with Blender since 2.8 and is preaching me Blender. And I was always known as a Blender Fanboi… crazy!
“I know the good word of blender bro no need to teach me, I should be teaching you bro. For now you see the light.”
I just noticed I made a mistake yesterday when trying to tweak the documents tab bar, some attributes can be changed, but most of them don’t give useful results, like auto-hiding just leaves a blank gap instead of giving more document space.
The only one that really worked is disabling expansion so you get “normal” tab widths. But the good thing is, Qt is open source, we could of course make a customized QMdiArea spin based on the original code and tweak it to our liking.
And to counter some of the Qt aversions that come up regularly, it’s not that Qt really stops us from doing something specific most of the time, it’s more that it does not have a ready solution for everything one could wish for.
Doing your own GUI classes is just quite a lot of work, especially with the cross-platform aspects.
Before you say “but Blender doesn’t need a GUI toolkit either”, but it’s a bit unfair to compare something with an additional decade of investor-backed development and nowadays several times more developers to Krita, plus it pretty much ignores all platform specific conventions and does its own.
We would probably still be discussing rather basic features if it wasn’t for Qt…
According to Tiar some time ago (hope I remember it well - sorry if I messed it up) there were 2 full-time developers just 3 years ago. It raised to 4 like over a year ago, and very recently it’s 7 (2 of which work part-time)
But of course I’m taking only about those developers paid from donations and steam/MSstore earnings. At the beginning whole work was done for free, and still krita depends on volunteers a lot.
Oh, and there are 4 GSoC contributors ever holiday. Don’t know for how long Google supports krita this way.
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I would love for that! Even just removing the duplicate name would improve it a ton! Yours also make more space for the colour wheel 
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