Hello everybody, I‘ve been studying painting with krita over 6 months. The assistant tool has helped me a lot, but I also encountered a few problems in use. One of the most inconvenient things for me is the editor widgets always being shown under the assistant tool.
I admit that it‘s convenient when using fewer assistants, but the experience becomes worse when assistants increase.
To clearly describe the inconvenience, I have roughly established a three-point perspective system as shown in the following figure.
You can see the editor widgets naturally jumble together and it’s difficult to understand the association with their assistants. I’m using v5.2 prealpha, so I can move the widgets and try to solve this problem.
Seems to be much better? Let’s zoom in on the canvas.
Please take a look at the selected widget on the left. It’s still difficult to find out which assistant the widget is associated with. Actually, though the widget becomes movable in v5.2, it seems to be not so useful when there are several assistants.
Some people may think that there will not be so many assistants used at the same time in actual painting. However, there will be more types of assistant and more powerful functions being added to the assistant tool in the future, so I think that cooperate with multiple assistants to take full advantage of them is not a strange thing.
Therefore, I think it would be better to make the assistants selectable and hide all the widgets until an assistant is selected.
In my vision, when an assistant is hovered over, highlighting itself rather than its widget can help users select the right one more easily.
And when an assistant is selected, the widget should always pop up near the mouse cursor rather than a fixed position near the assistant. At the same time, the function of creating a new assistant should be blocked. Clicking another assistant can select it and clicking a blank position can cancel the current selection, just like how the select tools work.
In this way, although each time adjusting the assistant will add one or two clicks, because the assistant is no longer occluded, there’s no need to adjust the position of the widget or think about the association of the widget. It can also prevent a new assistant from being created due to a skewed click. So I think the number of clicks will become less overall and the experience will become better.
It may be a considerable amount of work to make these changes to the assistant tool. And in the post Planned changes to assistants coming in 2022 (or later) I was very frustrated to find that “making the editor widgets hideable” was placed in the “Won’t do” list. 
But I still wish developers can consider this suggestion again. Thank you.
(My English is not very good, and this post was completed with the help of translation tools. Please forgive me for any offence.)