what ever reason he has/had … it is also no excuse to treat people like this over months and years. they are not the punching balls for his problems.
This also did not just escalate out of nowhere. It was brought up multiple times to him.
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Do we have a list of the developers? It would be great to know who they are, although I can guess a few. That’s probably too many to buy a coffee for but they should know how indebted we are to their skills and imagination.
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Absolutely. And I see little reason to push back anyway (except that one time he started dabbling in stochastic terrorism and that got me banned from his repo). The thing is, if you don’t defend yourself, the “public” may decide that the guy who punched last won the argument. People like a “strong man” these days, who can tell them who the enemy is. It’s largely their loss, of course. But we regularly see these posts popping up on how dt is losing out on the contributions of this one brilliant guy, without pointing out that most of the positive things that have continued to happen after he left are because he did, not despite.
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Contributors are here: Contributors to darktable-org/darktable · GitHub
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I did Oracle database support in a fairly large corporation. Some of my “users” insisted on portability to Excel. Initially, I wondered why. But over a few years, I had to look in to some of the things they were doing, and I was amazed. It was too long ago for me to recall any of the details, but that’s not important.
Excel looks easy to use and it can certainly be used that way. But some people can dig in to the deep features and accomplish wonderous things with them.
I also used to work with a dude who was really good at excel. We were processing medical data, and one day he was like “I’ve hit the max number of rows for an excel spreadsheet”… I’d never seen or heard of that before.
Me being me, I was like let me introduce you to postgres, and half a day later he was ingesting data from excel into postgres and running all his calculations that way. Way faster than excel too.
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People don’t realise how important providing feedback is. Even years later. Positive and negative. Specific. What do you use/like and what not and why (for both). It may not amount to a feature request or a bug report, but it may still guide where a developer puts his efforts. Not just for the warm fuzzy feeling but also because you don’t want to waste time on things nobody uses. It may just push you to fix that little thing you know is kindof broken or incomplete but that nobody has complained about so hey it doesn’t matter. Or you may get a suggestion on how to make even better use of it because now it becomes more fun for the developer to interact with the community. The “thanks” part I don’t particularly care about (sorry; we get that after every release just to make sure we don’t stop working) but the “I use this” is really nice. And I know that can be uneasy especially when the consensus is it is crap.
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Yep. I seem to recall (many years have passed and I may be totally wrong…) that the option to change the shortcuts within darktable was coded by a student, during a Google summer of code. Of course under the guide of one of darktable’s developers.
It was one of the first, of the many darkable features, I was really jealous of as a RawTherapee user 
DT is more than one person’s work. And I can only imagine what AP would have said about AgX being added to DT. AgX in my view has achieved what Filmic wanted to achieve but never really did.
Anyway, if DT’s loss is AP then I presume the world have all flocked to Ansel.
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The darktable shortcut system has revolutionized my editing. I came from Capture One, where you can hold down a key while dragging your mouse, to change some sliders.
I could replicate the same thing in darktable, e.g. E + mouse changes exposure (I use move instead of drag, which is even better). But I also map Shift-E-move to do fine changes, double-tap-E to reset to defaults, and single-tap-E to “edit”, i.e. open the floating exposure editor. It is highly useful to me that a single key can do these multiple, related things.
I use other shortcuts to enable/disable modules, such as local contrast. Some modules I’ve set up with a default-zero blend strength, and the shortcut changes the blend strength instead of the module slider itself (e.g. the blend strength of a clarity preset in the Contrast EQ).
Some other shortcuts just activate specific modules, like cropping or retouch. Some others activate pickers, like the color balance white point.
It took me a second to understand how to create shortcuts. Double clicking the entry in the big table is a bit clunky. But the shortcut picker helped tremendously with that. It’s also a bit cumbersome that you need to remove some shortcuts (by setting them explicitly to no-action) before you can rebind them. But these are not hard to understand, just non-obvious to discover.
Overall, this allows me to edit most (ordinary) photos with one hand on the keyboard, and one on the touchpad, without interacting with any sliders directly. This very quickly became second nature to me: When I want to increase brightness, I no longer think “go to the basic tab, then search for the exposure module, click to expand, then pinpoint the slider head, then drag to change exposure”. Instead I just think “make image brighter”, and my hands do their thing. Can you tell I used to be a heavily customized Emacs user?
At this point, I’m thus much faster in darktable than I’ve ever been in Capture One or Lightroom (despite LrSuperKeys). Also, there’s great satisfaction in not just using a tool, but making it mine in some small way.
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I totally agree even though I personally use few shortcut keys. I wonder if that is something I might change in the future. there is some discussion on the forum about improving shortcut setups after the release of 5.4 and this might motivate me to adapt more shortcuts in my editing process.
Tantacrul mentioned in the finale video that the average user uses 10 or less shortcuts (which includes standard things like ctrl+s)
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We don’t need to judge the person, but we can judge the behaviour. I’d much rather be part of a project and community that is kind, generous, supportive and collaborative than one where the software runs milliseconds faster, has less bloat and leaner code.
As a user, I can understand why developers must get frustrated with bloat and poorly optimized code, but I want them to know that we often barely notice it unless it makes the UI uncomfortable to use or processing times uncomfortably slow.
I can’t imagine using Ansel simply because I would miss so many features about the current version of Darktable, but mostly because I would miss this particular project and community.
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Just a general note: why all that reasoning about a person who isn’t present here? That’s a style reminiscent of old gossipmongers, which does not reflect positively on the darktable community.
Everyone is free to decide whether or not they want to contribute to FOSS software. And if fairly good developers leaves the community because they are disappointed with the development of a project, then that is unfortunate, but possibly the better alternative to endless arguments about the correctness of decisions.
And if someone is invested in ranting on darktable - does it make darktable less usable? Simply ignore it.
So better use your energy to improve the tool we are talking about in this section of pixels.us …
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@MStraeten I think this is a good point.
Perhaps this should really have been posted on Aureliens Ansel forum not here. I agree with your comments and I’m not sure to what end it advances any aspect of current darktable development .
When he was here I both interacted with him and also commented on his tone so my comment here is not in defense or condemntion of anyone but I think echoing @MStraeten we are better off sticking to the current state of DT development than dredging up past grievances… Take the high ground and move on…when you don’t provide fuel for the fire it burns out…
Well he doesn’t have a forum currently, if.you visit the domain, it says he was hacked.
Perhaps his protest against the French govt backfired 
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I for one would be in favour of the moderators applying a version of Godwin’s law whenever someone tries to bring this whole thing up again. It is not too late now for this thread.
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I feel part of a community with this project. I can’t code but I can at least test the weekly builds by exclusively using them for my edits. I want to contribute to the documentation one day. I teach DT classes in my home city and promote it to the photography students I teach.
If any of you come to Tasmania on holidays please reach out and I will be your guide for the day. I can show you some of my favourite places to get a camera out.
I find this forum a friendly and welcoming community of people.
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