Docking HellGimp (the drawing program) has dockable subwindows. Those dockable windows are a serious contender for the prize for the most unintuitive UI. They offer the following nasty trap:
How do you re-dock a dialog that you undocked by accident?
this is maddening. i can't get any help elsewhere so hopefully someone here can get me out of this hell.
SourceYes! Hell it is!
try as I might I cannot manage to redock it
It just refuses to be fixed like the dialogue in "Layers/Brushes" on the right.
P.S. My awkward workaroung so far is to close gimp, delete the ".gimp-2.8" folder and restart gimp again; and loose the previous settings Sad
SourceResign, close the program, and nuke your settings.
That's a whole level worse than anything we complain about in our own software. Sure, we had the occasional NeoLemmix user cancel the replay by closing NL, then reopening NL. But never anybody had to erase the settings or reinstall the program into a fresh directory. Maybe Lix's resolution options have more lock-out potential than anything in NL. I don't even know if it's possible; it might be possible to willfully enter garbage
and still somehow avoid the automatic fallback of 640x480.
Anyway, back to Gimp. When your settings directory on hard disk is more discoverable than your drag-and-drop GUI ... you've written quite some drag-and-drop UI.
You can right-click the subwindow and you'll find a checkbox option "Lock tab to dock". It's unchecked. Can you check it? Yes. Does that re-dock the subwindow? No, that would be too easy. This option prevents accidental undocking, but that's only useful
before you've undocked your tab. Now it's too late, and the option won't do anything until you've re-docked, which you don't know how to do.
Solution: Drag-and-drop the tab, not the window. The window (which your system's window manager manages), called, e.g., Tool Options: You can drag this around, too, for sure, but
it will never dock. You must drag the single
tab from inside the window, and the tab is
also called Tool Options.
When you drag the
tab (not the window), suddenly, Gimp plays ball, rolls out the red carpet, and offers you nice grid previews for docking your fine dialog.
Now it looks easy and well-implemented. It feels so nice that, certainly, nobody on the internet will now understand how this comfortable UI can be terrible.
-- Simon