Thanks for your very detailed post, @dfcsd. There is for sure a lot to unpack.
There is a search box that works quite well.
Can the search box be made more prominent and accessible? Yes. But finding modules isn’t hard at all, I would say.
This has been proposed and discussed multiple times. I used to be ambivalent about it, but now I understand why we do not want to hide or confound the pipe order. The reason is very simple: if you do not know what the input of your module is, you cannot possibly operate it correctly. For one thing, raster masks are only published by the previous modules in the pipe. If you do not know which modules come before, you do not know which raster masks are available to you.
In summary, being able to rearrange modules independently of their pipe order may be useful for experienced users (who do not really need it) but would be more harmful than not for novices, who would be just be more confused (why can’t I use this raster mask? why does my image look wrong? which module introduced these artifacts? etc.). The current approach requires a bit more effort (really, it’s not that hard to understand that information flows from the bottom up) but it is way less confusing and error prone.
Should the UI make the pixelpipe order more obvious? Yes. The empty screen that you get when you have no photos in your collection tells you how it works, somehow, but that is not enough. I think that some visual clues for beginners (e.g., numeric indicators next to each active module, or a very clear arrow pointing up next to the right panel) would be very beneficial in this respect. Of course, one should be able to disable these visual clues when one does not need them anymore.
While each tool has more or less it’s own jargon, so I am not so convinced about the “industry standard”, I agree that darktable’s sometimes appears to be cryptic by design.
Agreed, there should be more consistency. Also, the “right click to open the precision selector” or whatever the widget is called is not very obvious, which is a pity. It’s a very cool and useful feature and it should be more advertised.
I agree, there is a lot of margin for improvement there. It’s difficult to say exactly what I don’t love about them, they just feel clunky and snappy to me.
Agreed. I think that having multiple panels would make a lot of sense, especially given that a lot of people have widescreen monitors nowadays. I had also put together a working proof of concept, but it was not received very well: