Usability: Selection: moving pixels is hard

[teadrinker]

Been playing around for 1-2 hours, and the most strange thing to me is the behaviour of the selection tool. After I make a selection I cannot move the pixels it seems, if I cut/copy and paste, the pixels are moved, but only to the corner of a new layer... Eventually I figured out I can use ctrl+E to copy to brush, which is very nice, as I'm an old deluxe paint user :)

I might have missed something...

Anyway, it would be nice to have ps-style pixel-moving shortcuts:

• control+drag to move pixels in selection (or entire layer if selection is empty)
• control+alt+drag to duplicate pixels in selection (or entire layer if selection is empty)

[steffest]

Mister Teadrinker! Nice to see you here.

About the selection: I had the somewhat naïve idea to decouple the "selection" from all the "drawing and moving" actions. I don't really like how selections in e.g. Photoshop work, so I thought: let's try something else. Selections are currently mainly used to copy/cut pixels to a new layer. (Ctrl-J or Ctrl-K) You can move a selection using the cursor keys, or you can move a layer if you hit "T" or "V" (Layer -> Free transform) and then drag or the cursor keys. However, you can't directly "move the selected pixels" as you can in e.g. PhotoShop. I always move the selected pixels to a new layer first, move that layer, then merge back if needed. Likewise; drawing actions are also not limited to the selection as e.g. PhotoShop does.

At the time it made sense to me, but I often hear that this is super confusing for users so I'll probably change that in the future.

For now: The "control drag" would be:

• if there's a selection; first "ctrl-K" to cut them to a new layer, then "T" (transform) and drag that layer, then "Ctrl-Shift-down" to merge that layer back.
• if there's no selection: just press "T" and then drag the layer, Enter to commit, Escape to revert.

As I type it, this seems cumbersome indeed :-)

[teadrinker]

must confess I did not look through all the menus, then I would have found T/V!

I do think improving selection/transform behaviour would benefit new users... One thing you could perhaps try is to automatically cut-to-new-layer and switch to transform if the user clicks the selection without dragging? (again, not sure if this is a good idea but in my head it feels like it might work)

Additionally (but unrelated), in the transform mode, clicking without dragging could switch to rotation instead of scaling (basically the behaviour in inkscape if I remember correctly)