Changing text font is often unnecessarily complicated
I remember a time when text formatting in GIMP was done entirely via the tool settings. Very straightforward.
Then the functionality to selectively edit the formatting of text selections was added. Certainly a reasonable feature, but it came with a number of problems that somehow still haven't been resolved.
The most annoying one used to be that whenever I selected all text, it always changed the font to some symbol font I never use. Luckily that problem seems to have gone away recently. But another very irritating thing still happens:
The issue:
When a new text layer is created, and some simple text is typed, formatting can still be controlled via the tool settings. In 95% of cases that's all I need. But very often, for unclear reasons (usually once I've added line breaks), that ability just vanishes. Then no matter what, the tool settings don't affect the text at all anymore. I have no clue what triggers this. It's not caused by me consciously changing the formatting of only parts of the text. If it was due to the text for some reason having non-uniform formatting, it should reset once I manually unify the formatting via the text formatting popup, right? Nope. The change seems to be irreversible.
"Just use the editor window, dummy." Well, that's of course a possibility, but one that has a major drawback: It's very inconvenient to change the font via the editor window. That's because, unlike with the tool settings/fonts menu, you have to manually enter the full name of the font into the font selection box. Sure, you get suggestions for it, but you can't just scroll through the list of all fonts to see which one looks best. You have to already know the name of the font. You also can't use the filter function of the fonts menu (the fonts menu also no longer affects the text.)
Further comments:
I think this is very counter-intuitive and opaque UI behavior. Opaque because it's not clear what is causing the sudden loss of control via the tool settings (hence I can't offer reproduction steps), or whether and how it is reversible, and counter-intuitive because you cannot use the regular fonts list anymore.
System information:
GIMP version is 2.10.24 via Arch Linux package. OS is EndevourOS with KDE.