[ANTSANTS]

After expanding an image (as in, adding blank space on the borders), you have to manually expand every layer to fit the image, or you won't be able to draw anything in the new area. Deferring layer resize until you draw on the resized layer might have been an acceptable micro-optimization. Making me resize the layers myself is just stupid. Your editor has a problem when it's faster to copy the whole image into a new, larger image than it is to just use the provided resize command. (angry swears omitted here, because I'm not sure what exactly HN will autokill)

Instead of following the image editor standard of having a selection edit tool and an "edit the pixels selected tool," you have separate tools for scaling a region, moving a region, and so on. A fairly intuitive operation in Photoshop or Paint.NET (drag the corners of a bounding box, switch to the other mode, drag the corners to scale or move the box to move, etc) requires switching between several tools in a way that I have never been able to understand.

Suffers from what I call "emacs syndrome" -- wasting valuable hotkeys on things that no one ever uses. See E, one of the easiest keys to hit with your left hand, which is bound to... select ellipse. Clearly we select ellipses more than we erase, which is bound to Shift-E...

I've used it for a few personal projects out of curiosity, and I still don't understand how you're supposed to do basic things like make a color palette with it. Googling "how to do X with GIMP" always makes me laugh: How do I place two images side by side? "Make a big image, paste the two images into different layers, position them yourself, and crop" is the only answer. Clearly that's what people were looking for.

I don't understand how it's possible to create such a stupid program. I've barely used it, but every time I do, I encounter new sources of frustration. I have literally never had a positive moment with this program. It's like the developers have never actually used it to draw something or edit a photo.

Open source devs sometimes get flack for copying popular closed source programs. I wish the GIMP devs had just blatantly copied Photoshop every step of the way. They're just wasting their time now. No one cares about technical improvements to an editor that you can't even use.

[byuu]

> It's like the developers have never actually used it to draw something or edit a photo.

That seems like an unfortunately common trend. If you ever try any of the hex editors on Linux (ghex, Bless, etc), it's very evident that they were written by people who have no experience actually using hex editors. It's as if they saw a missing tool on Linux, and decided to make it, despite having no personal experience or desire for said tool. It's just a checkbox to tick off.

[stelonix]

Have you tried wxHexEditor? I found it as good as Hex Workshop, at least.

[byuu]

I have not, will give it a try, thanks. You read my mind though, always liked Hex Workshop. Favorite is the 2.54 release, but it sadly doesn't run on Vista+ (can't open files.)

Screenshots don't look promising, but it's all about the available settings. Ghex and Bless would base column count on the window size, and wouldn't remember your window geometry between runs. So every single run I had to resize the window to hold 16 columns so that my addresses on the left were predictable.

Ghex would re-display its 800x480 number converter every time it was opened, with no way to leave it off for good. I've used those things exactly zero times in the 15 years I've been reverse engineering things. I don't know why every hex editor loves them so much. How often are people really editing files full of nothing but IEEE754 float values?

Both lacked side-by-side editing, which thankfully it looks like wxHexEditor has. As long as it has a fixed-column count setting and strong "compare files" features, I think this will do nicely, thanks.

[morsch]

Maybe there's another way to resize the canvas that you're using, but the standard way, the menu option Canvas Size... has an option to resize some or all layers (defaults to none): http://imgur.com/Yk0oaKx Just an FYI.

[ANTSANTS]

Oops, not sure how I missed that. Resizing all the layers (maybe lazily until the user tries to draw on them, if that's such a waste when you have a 100 layers or something) should definitely be the default, though. I'd wager that's what people want 99% of the time.