Flameshot: Improvement to the pin tool

[hosiet]

Currently flameshot provides a simple implementation of image pinning. However, this implementation is quite simple. Once the image is pinned, it floats at the top of the desktop and can be dragged around, but that's basically everything. In order to close this pinned image, one will have to use the "Esc" key or double click on the image. Otherwise the only possible way is to close from the window list. This is not friendly to tablet users who have limited access to the keyboard.

I think the following improvements can be made:

• Allow right click on the pinned image; a menu should pop out giving options to close the pinned image or save it as an image file on disk.
• Document the usage of pin tool somewhere. I doubt users ever know the behavior of "double click to close".

[borgmanJeremy]

This sounds like a great idea.

1. Will right click work well on tablets? We have gotten a fair amount of feedback when features do not work well on touch interfaces. Perhaps a long press would activate it?

2. For demonstrating the new features I think we can tie in a "Tip of the Day" to the welcome screen @mmahmoudian is working on.

[hosiet]

1: I had some touchscreen laptops in the past; at least on Windows a long press will be automatically interpreted as right click.

2: That looks too heavy to me. We are not a full-featured IDE with tip-of-the-day window on startup...

[borgmanJeremy]

Okay lets start working on just the menu part and for the tip of the day stuff we can discuss on #887

[mmahmoudian]

I myself didn't know that double click works on pinned image.
it is clear that we suffer from poor documentation. the website should be also re-structured to have a dedicated section for UI and CLI.

About tip of the day, I agree that might be over-doing it, but I can also see some merits in it. The main question is how heavy would it get it we implement that in the welcome screen? if there is a dedicated box to show two lines of text randomly chosen from a pool.

[ZetaoYang]

About the advanced features of Pin tools:

1. right-click to bring up the editing tools back.
2. accept external image drag and drop to replace the pinned image.
3. when the mouse wheel is scrolling and zooming, the pin widget shows the zoom percentage on the top left corner of the image.

[mmahmoudian]

@ZetaoYang I have flameshot-git (r576.f34def6-1 AUR) installed and none of the things you mentioned worked:

1. right-click did not bring up any tools (double-right-clicking closed the pined window)
2. drag and drop didn't work from Firefox and Pinta
3. mouse wheel change the zoom (this is also something I didn't know), but no percentage were shown anywhere

[ZetaoYang]

@ZetaoYang I have flameshot-git (r576.f34def6-1 AUR) installed and none of the things you mentioned worked:

1. right-click did not bring up any tools (double-right-clicking closed the pined window)
2. drag and drop didn't work from Firefox and Pinta
3. mouse wheel change the zoom (this is also something I didn't know), but no percentage were shown anywhere

I mean new features that flameshot can add in the future.

[mmahmoudian]

@ZetaoYang 😅 seems I got too excited too early

[AlexP11223]

I and others from #554 want a way to remove border. It is implemented in #622 but we did not find a good way so far to introduce such setting except adding a separate option in the app settings. Preferably without the need to set it manually for each pin every time. It is not possible to add it in the side panel via a tool-specific widget like for Text because pin activates immediately. And using the global thickness value is not ideal too because then we would need to adjust it all the time when choosing other tools.

[mmahmoudian]

I just realized that you cannot pin the image if the "close after capture" is on. Reported it as a [logical] bug in #964

[Pauloo27]

About the advanced features of Pin tools:

1. right-click to bring up the editing tools back.
2. accept external image drag and drop to replace the pinned image.
3. when the mouse wheel is scrolling and zooming, the pin widget shows the zoom percentage on the top left corner of the image.

What about having a command like flameshot pin <file> to pin from a file? I tried to do this once but (as expected from someone that doesn't know C/C++ and Qt) I couldn't make it work.

[mmahmoudian]

@Pauloo27 Two points here:

1. I think you should create a new issue for this as a feature request as it is slightly off-topic here.
2. This is my personal opinion: Flameshot is an screenshot app and it is not image viewer. Therefore, I suggest using an image viewer that is suggest in https://suckless.org/rocks/ . For example, feh.

[Robou]

I just discovered this whole feature by reading this github issue section, even though I use flameshot on a daily basis since a couple of years haha. :rofl:

1. Allow right click on the pinned image; a menu should pop out giving options to close the pinned image or save it as an image file on disk.

2. Document the usage of pin tool somewhere. I doubt users ever know the behavior of "double click to close".

1. Good idea!
2. I think the on-hover tooltips can be greatly enhanced and used more intensively.

I see several possibilities :

1. More text displayed on hovering the buttons by writing more text on the on-hover Tooltips.
2. Implementing a new tool beside the other tools, or accessible from the system-tray menu, with all the documentation on a single page or on a mini-wiki.
3. Implementing a "What's this" mode: adding a new "?" button beside all the other tools, by using the QWhatsThis class instead of the basic QToolTip class. So you click the "What's this?" tool and the click on the tool you want to learn the usage, and then there is a small pop-up documenting the tool and all of its secrets.
4. If it is only for documenting the Pin Tool, there could be a last solution : place a "?" button in a corner of the pinned image in order to have a popup with the instructions.

[MyriaCore]

What about having a command like flameshot pin <file> to pin from a file? I tried to do this once but (as expected from someone that doesn't know C/C++ and Qt) I couldn't make it work.

@Pauloo27 @mmahmoudian A corollary of this is proposed over at #1100, in a way that I feel is more productive than exposing the pin tool specifically.

[AlexP11223]

1100 probably can't allow https://github.com/flameshot-org/flameshot/issues/954#issuecomment-697664740 because it would probably need to have the titlebar in order to be movable while having editing tools, so it would still need to have some kind of pin mode (remove titlebar and tools).

Also saving + re-openning file is less convenient than just clicking the Pin tool.

[MyriaCore]

@AlexP11223 Funny, I was just writing up a border-removal proposal in a seperate issue. Thanks for your contribution!

I'm now realizing this might have been a communication issue, though. I didn't mean for my comment here to be part of https://github.com/flameshot-org/flameshot/pull/622#issuecomment-697641235, I was just trying to say that it would effectively deliver what @Pauloo27 was describing in a way that might alleviate @mmahmoudian's concern that we'd be reducing flameshot to an image viewer.

NGL, it was kinda a weird decision to roll #622's discussion in here, since the challenges there are specific to that PR, and don't appear directly related to the issue topic, which seems to be more about improving the pin tool's docs and expanding flameshot's capabilities after an image has been pinned.