try to convince me to use gimp

so at lt fish's advice in one of his recent threads, i tried out gimp to animate a new panel for officequest. never again.

• the keybinds are awful - ctrl-shift-a to deselect instead of just esc, r for select tool instead of s, I don't know what eraser was but it certainly wasn't e and move selection certainly wasn't m. this forces you to use your mouse way more than necessary, slowing things down a lot.
  
• the move selection, resize selection, and rotate selection actions were all in different tools that you constantly have to switch between. the resize and rotate tools open dialogs, further slowing down the process
  
• the animation wasn't nearly as powerful as I had hoped - you can't have a single layer as a universal background for all frames. even on replace mode transparent layers don't clear the ones below them, just overlay them. it took me 30 minutes to figure out what was going on and how to get around it.
  
• layers can be different sizes, and some can be larger than the image boundaries. enough said
  
• the only way to find keybinds is in the keybind menu - tooltips do not display them
  
• the ui is a goddamn mess, even in single window mode, and is especially awful on a laptop with a small screen and touchpad
  
• ctrl-z does not appear to undo filters, you have to manually remove them in the filters menu (I may be wrong about this one)
  

gimp is a very powerful-looking program, it looks so much better than paint dot net for writing plugins on, and I really WANT to like it. it's just so tedious and frustrating and confusing.

I have similar problems with GIMP; as it stands, it still has the capacity to animate at all, compared to PDN.

GIMP also does this thing when tablet drawing with aliased art that makes all your lines gross and wiggly, too. It's like it's only built for antialiased art.

SAI in my opinion is better for drawing, PDN is for image manipulation, and GIMP is for animation. Photoshop is the warlock buffalo that, when tamed, allows mastery of all three.

Honestly just acquire yourself a copy of photoshop; even the older versions that are now more or less freely available sound like they'd be streets ahead

Animation: For clearing with transparent layers you're thinking of something more like masking and honestly I haven't bothered with that sort of stuff myself. No universal background layer does sound problematic. I've heard Krita is good for animation but that's mostly a drawing program.

Layers larger than image boundaries: This is actually functionality expected for good reason. It's very much a good thing when it comes to many things. There is more functionality in allowing this than disallowing this.

I also recommend Photoshop. Of course, with any change (especially from something like PDN - which I used before Photoshop) it takes some getting used to, but it's absolutely worth it.

You can write scripts in js, automate macros, define your own filters, etc. etc. I personally do not like GIMP.

Why would I care what art program you use
Just stick to ms paint it has none of those problems

Speaking of animating in Photoshop, does anybody know of any good frame by frame tutorials for PS? Cuz I can't figure that out for shit!!

I usually just make the prev layer translucent like onion skin and draw on the next. I don't prepare animation until all frames are done.