I haven't used Windows as a primary OS for years. I miss having MSPaint around for small edits, and have yet to find a suitable replacement. Other apps either have too few features (e.g. Preview) or too many (GIMP), or the interface doesn't feel right. It might just be because I'm used to it after using it for years when I was younger, but MSPaint's interface just makes sense, and it hits the sweet spot of features for quick, simple edits.
This feels very similar to the original, and after a quick playthrough seems feature-complete. Well done! I'm not sure how I feel about it being web-based but I guess in this day and age it just makes it more accessible.
There are a few, Kolourpaint is pretty much an MSPaint clone for KDE [1] and Paintbrush is the macOS equivalent [2]. There is also Gnome Paint [3], but hasn't seen any update in years. I suppose the closest would be Pinta [4], although that is slightly above MS Paint on the complexity level (probably more comparable to Paint.NET than MS Paint).
> I'm not sure how I feel about it being web-based
Personally i find it amusing and impressive that this implements a Win95-like GUI (i love Win95's GUI :-P) but at the same time the actual editing feels very slow - painting something takes almost a second to update with the brush being very jumpy, reminding me using ZSoft's PhotoFinish on Windows 3.1 on my 4MB 386:-P.
It is also nice that it has implemented the select+shift+drag brush feature that is ignored by almost every other clone i've seen over the years.
> actual editing feels very slow - painting something takes almost a second to update with the brush being very jumpy, reminding me using ZSoft's PhotoFinish on Windows 3.1 on my 4MB 386:-P.
Works as fast as native paint on my laptop. What browser are you using?
> the actual editing feels very slow - painting something takes almost a second to update with the brush being very jumpy, reminding me using ZSoft's PhotoFinish on Windows 3.1 on my 4MB 386:-P.
It's completely and utterly indistinguishable from a native app on my PC (Firefox 57.0.4 (64-bit) on Windows 10). First thing I noticed was how smooth and flawless it was, even when I expand the canvas and go crazy with every single tool to make a big mess, it didn't slow down once.
On my Macbook Air, with Chrome and High Sierra it managed to crash Chrome impressively and force quit and hitting restart failed to do much. I actually had to hit the power button which is kind of unusual on a Macbook.
Aren't Mac applications supposed to have their toolbars as separate windows? Pixelmator (at least the pre-App Store version i have) does the same, as did some other apps i've tried at the past.
KolourPaint is very close. GIMP is great, but simple operations (ie. screenshot-crop-higlight-annotate) get complicated (layers, floating layers, text layers, alpha)
On Windows I've been using Paint.NET for years now. It's absolutely brilliant. Lightweight editing with quite a bit of extra features like properly working undo. Free, lots of updates, good UX. I use it at least few times a week.
Recently I've been on OS X a lot, and I wasn't able to find a suitable replacement. Like, nothing even remotely close. Quite a shame. Same story for Linux.
I used to use GIMP, but could never figure out how to use it. Downloaded Paint.NET, it worked _exactly_ as expected. I was able to get running and perform the edits I needed to perform in seconds.
I've never had such a positive introduction to a piece of Software, it works _so well_!
On Mac, I personally like Pixelmator for pixel level editing. It feels a bit like the old versions of Photoshop which always did the job for me. At thirty bucks, it's also pretty affordable.
Yeah, it's super half baked. I can tell you that as the developer. I plan to focus on collaboration in the successor to this project, Mopaint: https://github.com/1j01/mopaint
I've been an almost Linux/BSD user for more than a decade now, and I've always used 32-bit MSPaint from XP without any issue through Wine. Salvage the .exe from a Windows XP install and the necessary MFC .dll, and you're ready to roll.
Chrome apps are still a thing, chrome packaged apps were deprecated (unless you're on Chrome OS), so the type of chrome app that remains is essentially just a bookmark distributed through an app store.
You're not missing out on anything by that link being broken.
IMO the best painting/lightweight editing tool is paint.net. Since I moved to mac I moved to Gimp and it’s ‘fine’.. but paint.net is really the only tool I’m missing fron windows
Spend a little bit of money on pixelmator, you’ll be glad you did. If you can afford a mac you’ll find that buying pixelmator to replace gimp is worth it.
There are a few really good low-ish cost options on Mac. You should take a look at Pixelmator, Acorn and Affinity Photo. I think all have free trials. Out of those, Affinity is the one I use most, but that's because I also really like Affinity Designer (an Illustrator type application).
Maybe there's some sort of connection? Like maybe the port happened because there was some sort of universal platform where a dedicated developer would be sure to get a large readymade, appreciative audience as opposed to a small group of highly vocal micro-critics. And maybe that was more important to them than whether the language adhered to some paradigm that's really important if you look at things always from a single point of view? I dunno where these thoughts come from...
Look how easy it is to shed tears for free stuff you don't personally have the energy to do yourself: You didn't have to lift a finger but to write an internet comment.
Just wondering what you think it adds to the discourse.
I was in the same spot. A while ago I took an evening to try and learn doing basic edits in Gimp, and since then I have no trouble with it anymore. Not as bad as Vim, but there's indeed a learning curve to it. Now that I've learned it, though, I would never want Paint again.
I used pixlr a lot for a lot of minor editing, but with a new system on which I avoid flash like the plague, it turned out to be (arguably) the only webapp without a flash-free alternative.
Now I simply use Adobe Photoshop even for minor edits (Yes, it's bloated, but can't bring myself to install Flash just for one webapp)
mtPaint has pretty poor usability compared to MS Paint.
ReactOS has its own Paint, I wonder... it may be simple to compile it through winelib, or just run it directly via Wine. That'd be a pretty quick and legal way to get a functionally-identical clone.
I think the non-web app that comes closest to MS Paint in functionality is GrafX2. Only other paint program I've seen that has selection-as-a-brush. http://pulkomandy.tk/projects/GrafX2
The interface is a bit different than MS Paint but it has these absolutely wild features, like colour cycling, where the colours can change while you're painting, which can be fairly psychedelic. GrafX2 is more of a clone of DeluxePaint for Amiga.
I disagree about usability. Probably most people just used MS Paint first. MS Paint has different tools and different brush-tip (widths) for pencil/brush/spray-can/eraser that all do essentially the same thing (okay, the eraser's right click mode is different, but hardly anyone knows about it), and then the line/curve/box tools all have _their_ own width. This is all unified into one global brush/pattern option in mtPaint that everything uses. The zoom levels are better too. I think the only thing that's not obvious in mtPaint is the eyedropper.
The one thing I like in MS Paint is the controls to resize the canvas near its edges. Most other programs make you go through a dialog or select and then trim to selection.
I've been using an old version of Macromedia Fireworks for years now, and while maybe not totally 'lightweight' (you gotta wait for it to boot up), I've always found it intuitive to use for quick edits, while also having lots of other features if I feel like doing something more elabourate.
I have IrfanView on Mac (via Wine project) and it works flawlessly. However, if you don't want to install Wine on your OSX, there are other alternatives, some mentioned here already. Personally, I like xnview - its free and probably includes everything you'd want (and supports making a negative image)
When you double click one of the images displayed in xnviewmp the image opens in a window and then under the 'Image' menu item, there is a submenu named 'Map'. Selecting the Map submenu opens a list of functions that can be performed on the image, and one of them is 'Negative'.
It's Ctrl+NumpadPlus/Minus on mspaint, or just NumpadPlus/Minus on jspaint; no way to do it beyond the preset sizes without a numpad, so far, I'm afraid
You're assuming that I have an infinite amount of disk space to dedicate to arbitrarily large frameworks that are 'required' by simple applications. If every app you used required 200MB of baggage to run, you'd quickly run out of disk space. I'd rather use my disks to store more valuable things, and, on another note, most definitely do not want to encourage the proliferation of .NET/mono.
Then it still is _very_ limited in what it can do, in my opinion. It's nice for very simple things, but it hasn't become a Paint replacement all of a sudden.
It doesn't take very long at all to get familiar with basic Gimp features. The investment in time is minimal and worth it. You could probably figure how to do everything you can do in MSPaint in Gimp in 20-30 minutes.
And then when you need it the next time 3 months later you need to invest the same 20-30 minutes to relearn how to use Gimp. It isn't only Gimp that have this problem, it is hard for power users to understand the problems casual users has with using software
Protip: get an SSD. It improves your life in many ways. Three examples I notice between my girlfriend's HDD-based laptop and my SSD-based one:
- A game, Factorio, takes literally 5 minutes for her to get to the main menu. For me it takes about 30 seconds.
- Using `time gimp` and hitting alt+F4 immediately, I get about 2.14 seconds. For my girlfriend this indeed takes a little bit, though not a minute.
- Booting up (from cold) is maybe 20 seconds for me. For her, this takes more than a minute on Ubuntu and more like 2-3 minutes on Windows (it boots in the same time as Ubuntu, but then programs need to load which make it slow for another 1-2 minutes).
Not everything benefits from it, like web browsing or email is not I/O-bound, but lots of things go a lot faster for the investment. Especially for laptops, it's also quieter, supposedly uses a little less power, and won't die as fast from dropping it. I'd highly recommend it.
I'm not putting off your computer as being the blame for GIMP being slow - indeed, it's kinda silly that it takes so long to start, especially the first time - but I just figured you had an HDD and think the vast majority of people will benefit from an SSD. Even my grandma got one a few weeks ago and is super happy with it.
> the Linux version starts up faster than the Windows one.
Indeed. 4-5 secs to open GIMP on Linux here on HDD, and practically instant once cached.
Maybe try and start with some command-line options. Useful ones in your case:
-d, —no-data
Do not load patterns, gradients, palettes, or brushes. Often useful in non-interactive situations where startup time is to be minimized.
-f, —no-fonts
Do not load any fonts. No text functionality will be available if this option is used.
If you only use it once yeah. I'm super casual and just use it for cropping and resizing and whatnot, and have used it dozens of times. Worth 20-30 minutes.
I am a digital artist and I've been using Photoshop since 2000s. I still find it infinitely more comfortable to open mspaint and do quick resizing or image editing there.
When I forced to use gimp I simultaneously want to a) kill myself b) kill developers of gimp and their family members.
Well, it depends on what you're used to. Although I'm just a casual user, I've been using GIMP for years, and had similar feelings to yours when I had to use Photoshop once.
I'd be surprised. Very old versions did work on Mono, but by now it has accumulated quite a bit of code that uses not only Windows Forms, but also WPF, Direct2D and possibly a number of other newer Windows frameworks which I'm not sure Wine provides.
This feels very similar to the original, and after a quick playthrough seems feature-complete. Well done! I'm not sure how I feel about it being web-based but I guess in this day and age it just makes it more accessible.
I see there's a Chrome app, but the link is broken (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dgfedgcofbjmeohonb...)