busybee fluffy rambles

What I’ve tried

Here’s a non-exhaustive list of the drawing programs I’ve used and a quick description of what’s wrong with them:

• Photoshop: expensive, slow, buggy, unwieldy
• Illustrator: expensive, slow, unwieldy, object/layer model doesn’t fit my brain
• Affinity (both Photo and Designer): horrible workflow, terrible accessibility issues, no easy flat-fill workflow
• Clip Studio Paint/Manga Studio: fiddly UI, terrible keyboard accessibility, frustrating shading tools, frustrating export workflow, excruciatingly bad text tools, no good way to draw speech bubbles that don’t fit their crappy templates
• Acorn: no easy flat-fill workflow
• ProCreate: no text tool, over-emphasis on natural media
• Corel Painter: over-emphasis on natural media, really frustrating workflow, excruciatingly shitty updater which breaks a lot of other stuff too (all to occasionally spam the user with ads)
• Pixelmator: terrible accessibility (especially for keyboard), bad flats workflow
• Pixelmator Pro: brush engine is not useful for actual inking (for some reason there’s a ridiculous amount of pressure smoothing that can’t be disabled?!), UI has bad accessibility antipatterns, a couple of useful features are purposefully and bafflingly disabled on nested layers “for performance” but there’s no alternative provided for people who actually, y'know, need them
• Krita: bad accessibility, not-very-good flats workflow, terrible text tool, Mac version is buggy
• GIMP: bad accessibility, terrible text tool, Mac version is buggy
• Inkscape: bad accessibility, unwieldy, object/layer model doesn’t fit my brain, Mac version is nonfunctional
• FireAlpaca: terrible interface, laggy
• Medibang: terrible interface, laggy

What I want

Here’s a general idea of what I’m looking for in a drawing program:

• Keyboard access to switching tools, with configurable shortcuts
• Brush engine
  • Easily-configured dynamics (shape, size, scatter, opacity, flow, density)
  • Pressure-sensitivity to affect the various dynamics
  • Keyboard access to quickly set the opacity in particular
• Selection tools
  • Lasso
  • Polyline
  • Magnetic lasso
  • Magic wand (with ability to sample based on current/all/current-and-above layers)
  • Shapes
  • Modifier keys to quickly override add/subtract/intersect mode
  • Bonus: Grow/shrink selection by N pixels (as a keyboard-accessible command)
  • Selection from alpha
  • Bonus: ability to quickly toggle the most recent selection buffer
• Flood fill
  • Fill with constraint based on current/all/current-and-above layers
  • Bonus: don’t bleed through gaps below a certain size
• Vector tools
  • Polylines, bezier curves, circles, ellipses, etc.
  • Compound vector layers
  • Ability to fill and outline said compound layers as a whole
  • Ability to quickly edit/add/remove control points
• Text engine
  • Multi-line text with configurable justification/alignment
  • Multiple fonts/styles/colors within a single text object
  • Bonus: wrap to/follow/fit vector path
  • Bonus: per-character baseline, kerning, ligature adjustments
• Transform tools
  • Easily able to rotate/scale/distort (affine or perspective) current selection
  • Configurable filtering (bicubic, nearest neighbor, bicubic-with-threshold)
  • Bonus: curved distort
  • Bonus: puppet warp (ideally with a persistent adjustable rig rather than being a one-off)
• Layers
  • Nested layer groups
  • Opacity masks, both on individual layers and on groups
  • Basic compositing algorithms (normal, multiply, divide, lighten, darken, etc.)
  • Bonus: layer effects (inner/outer glow, drop shadow, outline, replace color)
  • Bonus: advanced compositing algorithms (halftone/dither)
  • Bonus: adjustment layers (adjust HSV/color, fill, gradient, exposure, etc.)
• Gradients
  • foreground to transparent
  • foreground to background
  • ability to set shape (especially linear and radial)
• Color management
  • Swatches
  • Color mixer/palette
• Fast export
  • JPEG, with preview of quality level
  • PNG, with preview of color reduction
  • Able to always export to a specific directory instead of the directory the source file is in
  • Bonus: Export content of all text layers to the clipboard (makes it easy to paste speech bubbles for editing in a transcript)
• UI aspects
  • Easy zoom/scroll/pan/rotate via touch gestures and modifier keys
  • Always-visible foreground/background swatches
  • Maybe don’t go overboard on a “docking” interface, and don’t move stuff around contextually
  • Nothing should be accessible only by a tiny click target or a UI where things need to scroll around
  • Keyboard access wherever possible
  • Bonus: easily-configured guides (both by dragging and by setting up rows/columns in a UI)
  • Bonus: easily-configured grid
  • Bonus: Snap to guides and/or grid

Things that I think of as non-features:

• Antialiased tools

  By working at a higher resolution, that removes the need for a lot of the selection tool stuff, since you no longer need to quickly grow and shrink a selection, and that also means you don’t need to do a compound magic wand selection to do a flat fill either.

  Even without antialiasing there’s still stuff you have to worry about with variable alpha, but it still becomes a lot more predictable when you aren’t generating a lot of extraneous alpha-blended artifacts all over the place.

• Fancy colorspace support

  Pretty much everything can deal with sRGB these days, including physical printing. I only really care about targeting the web anyway.

  16-bit channel support would be nice though. Heck, that should be the default for internal use.

I have so many ideas about how I’d build this sort of thing myself if only I had the time/motivation/energy/lack-of-pain necessary to do it. Bleh.