Blending mode icons
@ell
Submitted by Ell Link to original bug (#776545)
Description
Created attachment 342536 Example of the layer-mode badges concept
I'm playing with the idea of adding icons for the different blending modes. In addition to using the icons in the paint mode combo boxes, they appear as "badges" next to the layer name in the layers dock. The idea is to make the structure of the layer composition more apparent in the layer stack. Normal-mode layers don't display a badge, to reduce visual clutter and to better distinguish them from non-normal layers.
The attached image shows this concept in action (mind the awful contrast between the icons and the background :P) See the next comment for the complete set of icons.
Part of the motivation for this feature comes from the response to the proposal to add a "mask" layer mode, on https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=51112#c12. One objection was that there has to be a visual cue distinguishing mask layers from other kinds of layers in the UI, since they are functionally different. It's a good point, but IMO not specific to a particular mode -- the existing modes are already used for different functions. Hopefully, the mode badges address this concern; mask mode is something I'd like to see, both as a stopgap to, and regardless of, layer-group masks (for one thing, it would allow us to use arbitrarily complex compositions as masks, whereas layer masks are just "dumb" buffers, but I digress...)
Thoughts welcome :)
Attachment 342536, "Example of the layer-mode badges concept":
Version: git master