Srihari Sriraman

Read more by Srihari here

gimp tito

‘Tito’ is like Quicksilver inside GIMP. You bring up tito and enter something, it gives a dropdown of possible actions. You hit enter to execute that action. Michael Natterer (maintainer) told me on IRC about a year ago that it can go upstream with a few changes. Quite sadly, I haven’t had the time to make those changes.

It works pretty well though. Here are a few screenshots:

snap apply canvas desktop More screenshots here.

Currently implemented features

  • It searches first through labels and then tooltips of actions
  • It supports fuzzy search
  • It is adaptive: frequently used actions appear higher in the results list
  • It shows the tooltip, icon and shortcut in each search result if present
  • It is highly configurable via a preferences window

More high level details in the tito-readme. There is also an old screencast I made. It isn’t great, but you can see it in action ;)

The story behind it

We were four developers who knew little about gtk and git. We started off well and shared our initial prototype. We got a mix of positive and dismissive responses from the gimp dev list. You can see the thread where the devs and I debated the values it provided.

Quite a few devs tried it out and gave me feedback. I incorporated that feedback and fixed bugs and regularly interacted with the team on how it could be better. But tito got a fair amount of push back from the interaction design perspective.

We can finish this together

I really need some company in finishing this up. Mitch (Michael Natterer on IRC) took a look at the diff and suggested a few changes that would make it eligible to go upstream. I’ve created issues for these on github. My gut feeling is that this should take lesser than a week. Please get in touch if you are interested. Let’s collaborate!