Oh so this is not a photoediting class I thought. So I launched Krita. And everyone laughed when they realized Photoshop was the wrong tool for the job.

We had icecream.

400 years from now, we will have interstellar ships but we still won't have a shape tool for GIMP :(

Agree. Similar example is Matrix Element multi-account request. It's the most requested but we still don't know it's roadmap.

Tbf this is not exclusive to open source software. iOS famously didn't have "copy and paste" until version 3, for instance. The zealots were the ones that insisted that it was unnecessary until Apple rolled it out.

Plex constantly has requests for obvious features that are stated to not be on their roadmap.

Yes it is frustrating, but it isn't exclusive to open source development.

Unintuitive.

I heard of photoshop when I was 13 and I installed a pirated version, just started clicking around and I always found what I wanted in a minute.

10 Years later, I switch 100% to Linux, I have to do some light design work, I open gimp - I CLICK AROUND FOR HALF AN HOUR FOR SOMETHING SIMPLE - can't find it to save my life. Give up and google it, it gives me a reply like yours "just go to a completely unrelated menu to conjure a hack out of your ass that barely resembles what you originally intended to do".

Fuck that UX man. I am so glad pirated photoshop works well in wine nowadays and I have a VM with a legit Adobe suite if I ever need to actually whip up my license for some reason (fuck adobe as well btw.)

I pray that one day there is a real competitor that works natively on Linux. I pay, take my hard earned money every month, whatever it takes, just make it intuitive and reach near feature parity with PS.

If anybody is still reading, sorry for venting, the GIMPs always trigger me, have a nice day.

So many options that amount to more than just a shape tool.

If I wanted to learn some arcane bullshit to draw a circle Id just learn C++.

That's several more steps than it ought to take. Including the step of having to look this up, because you'd never intuitively figure this out on your own.

Wouldn't that simply create a bitmap circle, though? The advantage of shapes in Photoshop is that they are vectors.

Same energy as "so tired of idiots who want right click>new file on gnome, are you too stupid to open the terminal, cd 20 times and use the shittiest text editor ever to create a new file and save it and then open nautilus and navigate to the same directory, or something?"

Comparable to driving from washington to argentina instead of taking a plane (for those who don't know, there are no roads connecting north to south america)

Yeah but sometimes you want a circle in a bitmap.

Why does a shape tool have to mean vectors are involved?

Why can't I just draw some bitmaps in different shapes?

Wrong.

"GIMP is a cross-platform image editor ... Whether you are a graphic designer, photographer, illustrator, or scientist, GIMP provides you with sophisticated tools to get your job done." - gimp.org

Shape tools is a universal basic tool for any software that handle some sort of image creation or addition.

Photo editing, general image editing, painting software, page layout design, vector design, PDF editor, all of them have one.

Photoshop, Microsoft Paint, Clip Studio Paint, Krita, Photopea, Pixelmator, Affinity Photo, ... all of them have shape tools.

Heck, even Microsoft Excel and Word even have one.

EDIT: Shape tool is planned, not yet WIP. Source: GIMP Roadmaps

You're not wrong. But also, people would love shape tools in GIMP. It still feels like a really weird thing to exclude.

This comment has such a "Wanted to do X for a laugh? We had a tool for that, it's called Y" energy, and I think that's hilarious.

For illustration work, having good support for both vector and bitmap elements is pretty damn convenient. For example, in comics, you draw the comics themselves in bitmap layers, while panels and speech bubbles go in vector layers. Having the ability to edit the speech bubbles easily is pretty neat.

(Optimally inking/outlines would be vectors too, but most people prefer to do that with bitmap tools anyway, or vectorise later.)

Krita actually does these pretty solidly - vector tools are there and they're pretty easy to use. In GIMP 2, the vector path support actually is there and the editable texts are actually pretty great, but it has the air of "power user trick, for those in the know" rather than something people actually discover easily. You also need to update the vector strokes manually. (Haven't tried GIMP 3 yet.) The fact that people still assume you can't do this stuff really says it all.