Bug with slider textfield (GimpSpinScale)

[Alexis Pautrot]

Hi, I'm testing the latest build version of Inkscape 0.48+devel r12274
I'm running Windows 7 64 bits. I'm a regular (per day basis) user of Inkscape.

I have seen that you guys have changed all the value fields with those slider value fields (Blur & Opacity in Fill and Stroke, or Opacity in Layers, etc.). Those controls are a mess under Windows, and are simply unusable.

In practice, when you want to click for change a the text value, to select it, or to position the cursor before, most of the time, the controls is taking the click for positioning the slider cursor and fucking everything. You have to blindly find the pixel wide safe area where the control is not a slider to click the input text.

In first case, I'd like you to understand that when you change values such as opacity or blur, you never want real time changes. So editing with a slider is useless for 99% of the cases. Also because, most of the time your selection is too big, or your CPU is limited, the refresh of your change won't be real-time but on a 1 fps basis or less at best.

When trying to adjust those values, having this f*cking slider side effect is more than annoying. When trying to select the text value in order to change it, having the slider changing the value to something that have no meaning and slow you down, is so frustrating. And when the change is taking up to 4 or 5 seconds (because the miss click has set a blur at 97%), it is not only annoying, it becomes irritating and frustrating. Counter productive.

Sorry for my words (and my bad English :-), but I'm very very angry. Those controls are the last straw that broke the camel's back and made me leave Gimp, forever. I really don't want to be stuck with Inkscape version 0.48 or to work with such a painful edition of opacity/blur parameters that I'm editing hundred times a day. Please don't make that being painful. We just want a simple working not fancy text field. Not a counter productive control. No sliding things. Just a simple working text field.

Less is more.

I hope you will understand.
Thank you.

[su_v (suv-lp)]

AFAIU same complaint as filed in
- Bug #1184408 “Zoom Slider bar makes it very difficult to type in large zoom values (Win32, bzr r12342)”
  <https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/1184408>

[su_v (suv-lp)]

The new widget had been implemented based on this feature request:
- Bug #1014988 “Port Gimp 2.8 (spinscale) slider widget”
  <https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/1014988>

[LucaDC (lucadc)]

Yes, please, I second the request to take away that slider over the text entry field.
I see two main reasons for this:
 - if you want to type you have a hard way to find the exact point where to click to get into the text;
 - if you want to click-slide (to get the desired value avoiding the huge slowdown due to the screen update for all the useless intermediate points) and the point you need is inside the text, you just can't.
So neither sliding nor editing text are easy in this way. The two functions don't coexist well inside the same rectangle, IMHO it's just a bad idea against usability to quickly get rid of.

[BobSongs (bobspcrepair)]

Agreed.

The text could/should be in a separate field to the right of the "slider" to maintain the current functionality.

But as with other commentators, any attempt to click inside the apparent text field can result in the same effect of boosting the blur to near 100%. When many components are on the page, this can be problematic.

It *is* resolved quickly by using <Ctrl><5> for filter toggling. Blur can be corrected at that point.

[Alex Valavanis (valavanisalex)]

I'm in the process of refreshing the gimp widgets we're using. It looks like there have been a number of changes upstream since our last sync [1]. Let's test whether there has been any improvement before we change the widget.

[1] https://git.gnome.org/browse/gimp/log/app/widgets/gimpspinscale.c

[Alexis Pautrot (0-alexis)]

Hi
I tested the latest release of Inkscape (0.91), released at end of January 2015.

The "slider" widget still behaves the same, with no improvement.

It is in practice still impossible to click the text area without miss-clicking in the slider area and boost the value to nearly 100%.

This behavior just makes it unusable in practice.
I'm personally using Inkscape 0.48 and won't upgrade because of this.

[Edgar Tec (edgartec87)]

Hi, i'm a web designer and Inkscape has helped me a lot, but the new blur, opacity slider controls are difficult to use

[Greg Holst (gregory-holst)]

I second Alexis comment. I like to select the text before typing to make sure I clear any text that was there before. With the new slider design I can't use the mouse to select all because there is no space around the text to click and drag.

The default behavior of the new sliders is harsh an non-standard and from an intuition standpoint, I'm not sure whether it's a text entry box or a slider. They should be visually separate since they have separate functions (1) text and (2) visual slider.

I think the new sliders are ugly too. I realize they save vertical space on the sidebar, but I'd rather have a more usable widget than vertical space. We all have scroll wheels anyway.

[Espermaschine (espermaschine)]

On my recent work i accidentally boosted the blur slider to 97% and my computer was frozen for 20minutes.
Very annoying.

[jazzynico (jazzynico)]

Sure there are some places where the sliders are useful (when you don't need a precise value, e.g. in the predefined filters) but some other places where they are a real annoyance (particularly the Blur control, because it also affects performances).

@Alex Valavanis, did you manage to investigate the latest changes in the Gimp code?

If no improvement can be implemented, I suggest we replace the slider with a simple entry + spin buttons widget, like we did for the zoom widget, everywhere it's needed.

[jazzynico (jazzynico)]

<side note>
I set importance to Medium for now. But given the impact of moving the blur slider too far on complex files, I'm tempted to set it to High (Inkscape frozen for 20 minutes is almost like a crash IMHO, and most users would probably kill the application before).
</side note>

[su_v (suv-lp)]

@JazzyNico - there is also the pending issue wrt to Inkscape's license (ping bryce about it - Inkscape is GPL2+, but currently the binary is GPL3+, the same license is also displayed in the About dialog). The license issue was briefly mentioned in the original report tracking the implementation of the GIMP widget (bug #1014988), and resurfaced last year ahead of the 0.92 release (see board mailing list and board meeting logs - there was 1 refusal to allow relicensing [1]). AFAIU it is currently unresolved for <lp:inkscape/0.92.x>.

--
[1] Meeting 2016-07-08: transcript
    https://inkscape.org/en/gallery/item/9766/

[Patrick Storz (ede123)]

Fixed in master: GimpSpinScale was replaced by InkSpinScale, which has a separate numerical input field.

https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/commit/9ceb238f8a4f5527c3621740e75713ea79eceebc

[Alexis Pautrot (0-alexis)]

Love you guys !
Thx <B
( I'm still a regular Inkscape user btw (weekly), it's a fantastic software ! )

[Brynn (brynn4inks-deactivatedaccount)]

Happy dance!

Thanks Eduard, and everyone else involved in fixing!