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How to hide the toolbar?


anderpainter

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Hi,

How do you hide the toolbar? That is, the part with the little icons on it? (I never use it; it's much quicker to use the keyboard to activate menu commands than to stop and grope for the mouse each time.)

Most apps let you show or hide the toolbar, but I can't find this option in P.N. Thanks, A.

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Do you mean the window where the tools are ? If so press F5, F6, F7 and F8 to hide the windows and press again to bring them back.

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minners71:: Thanks for that tip for showing and hiding the tool palettes, which is nice to know.

In this case, I was referring to the toolbar near the top of the window, beneath the menus:

paint_net_screenshot.gif

I never use it, so it's just a busy, unnecessary distraction. It'd be great if we could hide it. Virtually all the other apps I use (that is, which contain toolbars) include that option.

Edited by anderpainter
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You don't/can't

Sorry.

 

The Doctor: There was a goblin, or a trickster, or a warrior... A nameless, terrible thing, soaked in the blood of a billion galaxies. The most feared being in all the cosmos. And nothing could stop it, or hold it, or reason with it. One day it would just drop out of the sky and tear down your world.
Amy: But how did it end up in there?
The Doctor: You know fairy tales. A good wizard tricked it.
River Song: I hate good wizards in fairy tales; they always turn out to be him.

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Sorry.

Hi David—There's no need for you to apologize. However, as you're one of P.N's developers, may I bother you with a "feature" request I've made a few times over the years (to no avail—yet)?:

IMHO, the most inconvenient thing about P.N is that it always opens its dialog boxes (effects, etc.) smack in the middle of the image you're editing. It even does this during the same session, when you've already had a dialog box open and moved it out of the way so you could see your image when you used it. This wastes a lot of time over the course of editing an image.

Would you please suggest to your fellow devs that P.N "remember" where the user last positioned each dialog box—preferably, from one session to another, as well as during the current session? That's been the normal behavior for graphics apps for many years now.

Thanks, dude! A.

Edited by anderpainter
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I'm honored that you assumed I was - I'm just a forum janitor. :) I work for Rick. ...without pay. Hmm. :/

As for your feature request - Rick has historically been against large-scale "Options" menus, mostly because it would be a troubleshooting nightmare on the forum. We already get hundreds of questions a month from frantic users who "lost" the Colors window, for example, and are worried that they'll have to buy a new computer to get it back. Can you imagine what would happen if people couldn't find the Save button, or the Cut button?

Bottom line is, Paint.NET is trying to be user-friendly to the greatest number of users. You and I are "power-users," so we kind of have to accept minor inconveniences (like the toolbars) so that the grandmas and nine-year-olds (both of whom we've had on the forum) can use it with some measure of ease and accessibility.

Does this help you understand a bit better?

 

The Doctor: There was a goblin, or a trickster, or a warrior... A nameless, terrible thing, soaked in the blood of a billion galaxies. The most feared being in all the cosmos. And nothing could stop it, or hold it, or reason with it. One day it would just drop out of the sky and tear down your world.
Amy: But how did it end up in there?
The Doctor: You know fairy tales. A good wizard tricked it.
River Song: I hate good wizards in fairy tales; they always turn out to be him.

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Bottom line is, Paint.NET is trying to be user-friendly to the greatest number of users. You and I are "power-users," so we kind of have to accept minor inconveniences (like the toolbars) so that the grandmas and nine-year-olds (both of whom we've had on the forum) can use it with some measure of ease and accessibility.

Okay, David, the toolbar isn't that big a deal (even though it does take up more space than I'd like on my netbook's 1024x600 display).

But there is no reason to keep having P.N open its dialog boxes, every time, over and over, even in the same session, smack in the middle of what you're working on. That has nothing to do with grandmas or nine-year-olds or your wife's hair stylist... It's just unnecessary user-unfriendliness. I can't see how it can possibly make anything easier for anybody.

If P.N did save dialog boxes' positions, there's only one circumstance under which I can imagine users "losing" them. That is, if they'd placed them near the right or bottom edge of the display, then started a new session on a lower-res display (e.g. switching from a large external display to a portable's smaller built-in display) where a dialog box's previous, saved position is now outside the display area. I've actually seen that with some apps.

Such window-losing can be easily avoided by having the app, on run, compare its saved window positions with the current display's resolution and, if it finds any windows now outside the display area, move them back into said area. Many people—though usually not the "non-power-users" you describe—use more than one display these days, so that's just good coding.

Maybe P.N already does this with its tool windows, which it does let users keep wherever they wish—and really, what's the difference?

Does this help you understand a bit better?

Sorry, no. And frankly, I think there's a limit to how much you can help people by dumbing an app down. Cheers, A.

Edited by anderpainter
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  • 2 weeks later...

Hmm, that's odd—I got an email message saying a user named "chinatea" had posted to this thread. There's nothing here, though.

Well, okay. Maybe it's just me, but considering P.N. already "remembers" where you put its windows (Colors, Layers, History, etc.), I don't understand why it can't do the same with its Adjustments and Effects boxes. You trust users not to "lose" the windows, right? So what would the difference be, other than not having to move the Adjustments/Effects boxes out of the way every time you used them? How could it possibly "confuse" users for the boxes to open where they, the users, had moved and used them?

I'm not talking about settings, options menus, or any of that... I'm just talking about standard behavior with users' convenience in mind—all users, not just so-called "power users".

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Hmm, that's odd—I got an email message saying a user named "chinatea" had posted to this thread. There's nothing here, though.

Probably spam that's been swept away by now.

As for the effect dialogs, I've heard this feedback (from you and many others) and I just haven't implemented it yet. Please don't take silence as a form of disagreement.

The Paint.NET Blog: https://blog.getpaint.net/

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  • 4 years later...
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