[Display image (file) location somewhere. "Open file location" would be nice.]

Hi! First of all - congratulations on all the excellent work with an excellent result!

One small thing I miss much though is that when I have opened an image for editing I cannot find file location information anywhere. It would be nice to show it as a tool tip on the top list of opened documents. Also context menu there with an item "Open file location" would be excellent! This is especially true when working with many images in a different folders and you open an image from "File->Open recent". Same suggestion applies for the list of "recent" images.

Please, excuse me if this feature already exists. But I could not find it.

Best regards,

Pavel

[Plugin indexing for faster startup]

13 hours ago, Rick Brewster said:

You can't use a CRC/hash for the index. The whole point of an index is to avoid all of that disk I/O on startup. If you use a CRC/hash then by definition you have to read the entire contents of the DLL. And the code in the DLL has to be executed in order to populate the menu.

 

At best you're looking at having this work (that is, loading all of the plugins) being done in background thread(s) while you do other stuff other than click on the Effects or Adjustments menu. And it _will_ interfere with things like File->Open. However, it may still be an improved experience, and it may happen.

 

A plugin manager is a different notion. Making it straightforward to figure out which DLLs go with which plugin, in a concentrated way, is definitely a good idea. Right now you can determine which DLL goes to which effect with the little tooltip on the menu item. But that doesn't tell you which other effects are in that DLL, and it's pretty clumsy.

 

I will fight against the idea of an index until my dying breath  Not just because I think it's a bad idea, but because I think it's a lazy idea. There are many other apps out there that index your darned fonts at startup. Ever boot up GIMP or VLC and have it make you wait for an extra minute because it has to index your fonts? That's really stupid. Paint.NET doesn't index your fonts and it has the fastest font chooser ever. No index needed, I just had to be smart, careful, and a little clever about how I did things. I haven't really applied that to effect loading yet.

 

Hi Rick,

 

Thanks for your reply. I do not want you to die by any mean so let's forget about the index (I see your point in using hash on DLLs and I do agree. IMHO file size + file times would give you pretty reliable and fast hash value in this case. The index will contain everything that Paint.net extracts from the DLL in the fastest to load form. But as we said - no dying.)

Some facilitated way of plugin management seems to be a good idea though.

In my case I was thinking of the possibility to have right click on an effect menu item, display a popup context menu with an option "remove from Paint.net", maybe along with other useful and related tasks. This will remove temporarily the item and permanently (remove the dlls) on the next startup. Just a simple to implement idea IMHO.

 

Again, thanks for your great work!

Regards.

[Plugin indexing for faster startup]

Hi Rick,

 

A bit old discussion, but here are my 5 cents.

First of all I greatly appreciate all the efforts you do to develop and improve Paint.net! Good job an well done! Keep the good work!

Here is my case. I have been trying different plug-ins looking for useful ones. I have installed different packages (bunches). I liked some tools from some packages, but ended up with around 900 dlls (I know, I know) in the Effects folder. I have a SSD but still the startup time is couple of minutes (!). It is difficult to delete the right 800 redundant dlls. The question here is which one to delete. Which may be a common paradigm with installing a plug-in package. Therefore a plug in manager is a good idea in general.

As a long time c++/.net developer I would dare to propose having a dedicated app for plug-in management, possibly with the UI similar to what other people suggested or to what is commonly recognizable. I imagine this app will not start if Paint.net is running.

The idea of plug-in representation cache is not bad IMHO. The cache can be easily checked and synchronized on startup against dll's in  Effects (and  other trusted) folder using CRC, hash, file write time+size or whatever "match" criteria is best. There is no problem for the cache file(s) to be in user's data folder as it will not refer to absolute paths (which can be checked).

 

If anyone has an idea how to leave only the right dlls among all without losing a day - please do not hesitate to share it.

 

Regards