Project status

[jleclanche]

Hi

Do you guys intend to take this project any further?
With your permission I would like to move it to an organization with an easypaint team, where others might more easily contribute to it if needed. Easypaint is a very much needed software but it needs more improvements.

[dennis123123]

Create a fork of it, that's the good thing about open source! If the original dev likes your changes, he might merge them into the original. No updates in 11 months... it's probably been abandoned or the author no longer has enough free time to work on it.

P.S. please see my feature request about transparent paste option :)

[jleclanche]

@dennis123123 When I do fork I try to do friendly forks. More to the point though, I don't have any followup if I fork without any devs - I don't have the time nor skillset to work on easypaint.

[AlisterH]

What on earth are you actually proposing then?

[jleclanche]

@AlisterH Read the post.

[Gr1N]

Hi guys! Nice to see that the project needed someone, but unfortunately I don't have any free time to develop the project. And probably I lost interest in it ... If you want you can fork project, because it is open source :)

P.S. but I have some strange minds to restart this project with Python... ;)

[jleclanche]

@Gr1N I'm very much open to PyQt5 based projects. Being a pyqt developer myself I could actually help more than I'm currently able to :)

I will fork EasyPaint to QtDesktop and add you there in the easypaint team - you are free to work on it there if you want or have other people join you there.. If you know anyone willing to join in let me know! This is very much an experiment so I'm open to feedback.

[dennis123123]

well, my python skills are non-existant... but if you need someone to test it, give me a shout ;)

[Gr1N]

Hello again!
I would like to listen some information from you about this project and his future. But first I'd like to give you some information about this project. I started this project as a university course work and I think this is reason why I stopped developing it some time ago. Because my course work ended. :)

But now I see that this project is interested in someone else and I do not understand why :)
Give me plz answers on some questions:

• Why you interested in this project?
• Are there any good analogues?
• If project you are interested in why you do not participate in development?
• What do you want to see from the project?

[dennis123123]

Hello! Nice of you to come back 😄

Because there isn't a good (and finished) MSPaint clone available for Linux. They all get abandoned when they are "almost" complete. GPaint, GnomePaint, EasyPaint, the list goes on!

There are image editors that are too complicated, like GIMP and mtPaint. If I just want to draw an arrow and a circle on a screenshot for example, it is about 5 menus and 20 mouse clicks in GIMP! ...compared to about 3 mouse clicks in MSPaint. For editing icons, and fast simple picture editing, there is still nothing I can find better on Linux that is feature-complete.

I don't have enough programming skills to be able to develop such software. A simple script or something - sure... but nothing even to this level of difficulty. I'd participate in development by reporting bugs, testing, feature suggestions, that sort of thing. But I don't think that's what you mean.

I'd love to see it being actively developed and maintained, and not just left in a corner of the internet to be forgotten about :(

[dennis123123]

Oh, sorry I forgot to add... I really dislike software bloat, so although KolourPaint is (was?) almost perfect... I am not prepared to install 500MB of KDE just to run 1 program!

[jleclanche]

Could talk to the kolourpaint devs to port to KF5 for less dependencies.

[AlisterH]

Hi Nikita,
Similar to dennis.
There is a need for a lightweight, simple to use paint program. Yes, there are countless paint programs, but most of them suffer from at least one of these issues:

• unfinished (upt, gpaint, Painter)
• huge (Gimp), or huge dependencies (anything that requires KDE, Wine, Mono or Java). Python might not be really huge, but there is a niche for programs which don't require it.
• weird toolkit and/or gui design (lodepaint, grafX2, xpaint)
• too complex as described by dennis; you actually need to learn how to use it (mtpaint)
  Lightweight distros often ship mtpaint because it seems to be the best compromise, but users complain that they want something easier.

I haven't contributed to the project because I am not a C++ developer, but I am learning now :)

[AlisterH]

Hey Jerome, you should also check out PaintField for LXDE-QT.
And of course Drawpile and Pencil are worth knowing about.

[Gr1N]

Thanks for answers. I really like the idea of ​​a simple painting program. What do you think about the idea of ​​restarting the project on Python? This is good idea or no?

[jleclanche]

I think it's a great idea. PyQt5 is very powerful.

[dennis123123]

Honest comments (don't mean to offend or discourage you though!):

I think you've done so much work on it currently, that restarting would just mean you've wasted all your previous effort... but if your choice is 1) abandon project, or 2) restart in Python....

...Restart in Python! 😆

I've compiled a list of features I think are required in such a program if this helps you at all:

• Open/Save JPG/PNG/BMP
• Undo/Redo
• Cut/Copy/Paste (including transparent paste)
• Flip/Rotate/Resize (selection / whole image)
• A small predefined color palette (MSPaint is 28)
• Freehand select & Box select
• Eraser (replace any selected FG color with selected BG color)
• Fill tool
• Color 'picker'
• Zoom (1x, 2x, 4x, 8x)
• Draw tools with changeable pixel width:
  • Freehand 'pencil'
  • Straight line
  • Rectangle (filled/outline)
  • Ellipse (filled/outline)
  • Curve tool
• Text tool
• 'Spray can'

As you can see, you are so so so close with EasyPaint! A few minor additions from my wishlist and it's "finished":

• Freehand select tool
• Transparent paste
• Double height color palette i.e. 30 instead of 15 (and ability to choose own palette RGB values)
• Show current zoom level on status bar
• Fix "rotate"
• "Filled" shape mode

[AlisterH]

Flip/Mirror should also be in your list of missing features Dennis... unless it's hidden somewhere that I can't find it.

---

I think it would be really good to implement those few missing features and fill the niche for a really lightweight basic painting program.
If you'd prefer instead to keep adding new functionality and Python is the way to do so, then that's fine, but I think it's more useful to fill that really lightweight niche - in the end people that need the advanced features will use Mypaint or the GIMP or whatever anyway.

[dennis123123]

#4 in the list :)

[AlisterH]

I thought the first list was required features and the second list was the required features which still aren't implemented...

[dennis123123]

oops, my mistake! Yes, flip/mirror shouls be in the second list

[Gr1N]

@jleclanche I see that you have knowledge about Python and Qt, so what do you think about:

• PyQt or PySide?
• What about Python 3 support in PyQt or PySide?

[jleclanche]

PyQt has full python3 and qt5 support, I recommend that. PySide used to be better, but not anymore since qt left nokia.

[Gr1N]

@jleclanche thanks and could you give me good examples of application written with PyQt (or PySide)?

[jleclanche]

Well there's a few pyqt apps in the KDE suite. I wrote a pyqt file manager a long time ago, it was pretty poor code but here it is:
https://github.com/jleclanche/flipper/blob/master/flipper/views.py

[Gr1N]

Thanks for information. Give me about two weeks I will try to make some prototype and understand whether it is possible do something about it.

[dennis123123]

😄 You have my full support! I doubt it, but if there's anything I can (and am able to!) help with, just let me know.

[AlisterH]

For editing icons, and fast simple picture editing, there is still nothing I can find better on Linux that is feature-complete.

Dennis - you might also like to check out rassam-paint. It has terrible icons, but it seems pretty feature complete - it just needs:

• a check if the file is saved before exiting
• the ability to zoom out past 1:1
• a couple more tooltips

[dennis123123]

Thanks for that - I will definitely take a look and give it a try :)

Are you involved in that project or just someone who has tried it?

[dennis123123]

Oh... binary only? so much for "an open source project"!
Unless I'm just missing the link for the source, I won't be testing it :(

[dennis123123]

My bad, found it! Just no source packages yet, just svn

I'm impressed! Agree on the terrible icons, and the toolbar arrangement isn't great - but feature-wise, we ("linux people") seem to be getting closer and closer to a good MSPaint alternative!

[AlisterH]

Don't say that too loudly - it sounds embarrassing... although I guess not if you look at it like this: we're complaining about the fact that most distros come with a program roughly comparable to photoshop... but they and it are free :)