I had posted a patch to a bug report to add support for a button to be
added to the toolbar for the layer dialog/widget (see
https://imgur.com/wkyxoqM), but it's been suggested i post here for
starters to start a dialog. So here i go :)
I was wondering what the reticence to having the button there was.
Photoshop has a similar feature to add layer masks which avoids having
to reach for the menu to enable it.
It was originally suggested i just make a keyboard shortcut but for me
and i would think for a lot of people that would not be exactly
feasible. I already have too many apps that could make use of that and
too few keys on the keyboard i could de-allocate from them as-is :)
For me and most folks coming from photoshop who may give GIMP a try
would find this slowing us down considerably in our work flow
(especially when working on composites where masking is heavily used).
Hence why i came up with a patch to add a button to add them from the
interface and opened a bug report for that.
Having said that, i've spent the week since pondering an alternative
that could solve everyones dilemma, which would be to add the ability to
ctrl-click the selected layer to enable a layer mask (which if that were
added, it would be trivial add the opposite effect to remove the layer
mask by also ctrl-clicking).
I haven't looked at the code yet (been busy with this whole icon themes
business lol) so not sure how feasible/work it involves but if it will
never get added there isn't much point for me to go on and try to
implement it.
So here we are, what do you all think?
