Projects opened or saved go into GTK's shared recent list, signed with the
effector application name, and the project menu lists the newest ten of
them. The GUI tests point XDG_DATA_HOME at a temporary folder so they leave
the user's own list alone.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The sidebar grew crowded as the chain got longer. The chain and the params
of the selected stage now share a Chain tab through a vertical split the
user drags, and the sources, canvas and seed move to a Setup tab. Stage
rows are compact, with their move and remove buttons shown only on the
hovered, selected or focused row.
Add effect had stopped opening: its menu of fifteen effects no longer fit
below the button, and GTK does not show a popover that does not fit. The
menu now scrolls past 480 pixels, and the button sits beside the chain
heading, where the split cannot push it down the screen.
The window code becomes an effector_gui library so a new GUI test binary
can drive the real window under Xvfb; ctest skips it when xvfb-run is
missing.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A picture with a title, a caption and a credit meant typing the same
font, size and colour into every text stage, and changing the look meant
typing them all again. A project now holds named styles: a stage follows
one, and editing it moves every stage that follows it at once.
The front-ends learn nothing effect-specific. A ParamSpec can be marked
.styled(), saying a style carries it rather than the stage, and
Effect::styleKind() names the pool it comes from -- so styleSpecs(kind)
is to a style what params() is to a stage, and a second text-ish effect
would slot into the styles that already exist. The look is what a style
carries; the words and the placement stay on the stage, which is what
lets two stages share a typography in two different corners.
stageValues() resolves one in a single place, and a stage keeps a full
set of values of its own beside the style, so switching it to Custom,
dropping the style, or opening the project in a build that does not know
it renders exactly the same picture. A style moves stages together; it
never holds the only copy of anything.
The command line builds no styles and passes none, so it renders what it
always did.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Trying a stage out meant removing it and building it again from scratch,
settings and all, to see what the picture looked like without it. A stage now
carries an `enabled` flag and can simply be switched off: it keeps its place
in the chain and everything it was set to.
`enabledStages` is the one place that reads the flag, and renderChain,
chainNeedsSources, chainTitle and chainSlug all go through it. A disabled
stage is skipped whole — handed no image and drawing nothing from the shared
rng — so switching one off renders byte for byte what the chain rendered
before that stage was added, which is the only thing that makes the switch
worth anything while comparing. Whichever stage runs first is the one handed
the sources, so disabling a leading scanlines lets blur lead and the chain
needs no images at all. The status line and the generated file name follow
too: they name what was rendered, not what sits in the sidebar. A chain with
every stage disabled throws rather than quietly rendering nothing.
In the interface it is a check on the chain row: the row dims, the params
heading says "(off)" and the settings stay editable — a stage being worked on
is not the same as one being deleted. On the command line it is
`--disable NAME`, which picks its stage by effect name exactly as the params
do. A project writes `"enabled": false` only for a stage that is off, so
existing project files are unchanged and an ordinary one stays uncluttered.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The canvas was two spin buttons, so "an Instagram story" or "A4 at 300 dpi"
was a number the user had to work out. src/core/canvas.cpp now holds one
table of standard sizes both front-ends read: a web format is a fixed pixel
size, a print format a sheet in millimetres that becomes pixels at a dpi.
Adding a format is a line in canvasFormats() — the dropdown, --format and
--help all walk the table.
The pixels stay the truth everywhere; renderChain never hears about formats.
A format is the presentation of a canvas, carried alongside the pixels in
Options and Project and empty for a custom size, and where one is named it
decides the pixels — so a project saved as A4 reopens as A4 rather than as
whatever it happened to measure.
In the interface a format fills the width and height in and greys them out
rather than hiding them: the size a sheet works out to is worth seeing. A
print format also shows a DPI row, and Custom hands the spins back keeping
the last size, which makes starting from a format and then tweaking it the
ordinary path.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The two-dimensional counterpart of scanlines: rectangular tiles cut at
random positions from the source images, in three arrangements. A grid
draws its column widths and row heights once so the cells stay aligned
even when jittered; brick repacks every row on its own so the vertical
seams do not meet; scatter fills the canvas from one of the images and
drops loose tiles over it.
The plan is drawn serially from the rng as scanlines does, but scattered
tiles overlap, so they are painted in plan order on one thread: letting
threads race for the same pixels would leave the output depending on
their scheduling. A source smaller than a tile is repeated to fill the
cell, sideways and then downwards, which keeps grid and brick gapless.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Writes a line or several over its input in a chosen family, weight, size
and colour, optionally on a box filled with a colour or with a picture
from disk. Like the blur and the overlay it needs no sources of its own,
so it can lead a chain; given sources it fills the canvas from a randomly
chosen one first.
Two param types rather than effect-specific branches in the front-ends:
Text, free-form text the user types, and Color, a colour written
"#rrggbb". Both travel as strings, so the interface gets an entry and a
colour button, the command line gets a flag (a colour that does not parse
is refused there rather than drawn as black), and a project keeps them
across a round trip.
The glyphs come from Pango, which draws through Cairo without a display,
so the core stays headless — but they are the one thing here that is not
byte-identical across machines: a machine without the chosen family
renders the substitute its fontconfig picks. Everything the effect is
handed, the rng included, is used exactly as every other effect uses it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Lays a single picture from disk over its input: fitted, filled, stretched,
left at its own size or tiled, centred or pinned to the top left corner,
nudged by an offset and mixed in by its opacity.
The file it needs is a new kind of param, Path, so the interface shows a
chooser and the CLI takes a file name, both without knowing an overlay
exists. Projects write it relative to their own folder, as they do a
source, and Image::load can now hand back the alpha channel instead of
flattening it onto white, so a cut-out PNG keeps its cut-out.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Whether an effect works from the loaded photographs is now part of the
declarative plug-in contract, next to params(): Effect::needsSources()
defaults to true, and blur — which only softens what it is handed — says
no and blurs an empty canvas when given nothing.
Only the first stage of a cascade ever sees the sources, so
chainNeedsSources() just asks the first stage. Both front-ends gate on
that instead of on "are there any images": the CLI only refuses an empty
batch when the chain wants one, and the interface renders a blur-led
chain with no images loaded, saying whichever thing is actually missing.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A project is the whole setup as a small text file: the source paths, the
effect chain with its params, the canvas and the seed. Reading and writing
are driven by the effects' ParamSpecs rather than by whatever sits in a
stage's values, so a new effect is saveable without touching this code, a
key an effect does not declare is never written or read back, and an old
project keeps the defaults for params that did not exist when it was
saved. Paths under the project's own folder are written relative, so a
folder of images and their project can be moved whole.
src/core/project.cpp carries its own small JSON reader instead of a
dependency, and names the line when a hand-edited file is wrong.
The interface gets a header-bar menu: New, Open, Save, Save As, with
Ctrl+N/O/S. The title shows the project name. Opening a project replaces
the sources, discarding a decode still in flight rather than mixing it
into the new project.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
renderChain runs a list of stages in order: stage 0 works on the loaded
sources, every later one on the output of the stage before it, so blur
after scanlines softens the scanlines rather than the photographs. The
effects themselves are untouched — none of them knows whether its input
came from disk. All stages share one Rng and run in sequence, so a seed
still reproduces the cascade byte for byte.
The sidebar grows an "Effect chain" list: add a stage from a menu built
from the registry, reorder it, remove it, and edit the selected stage's
params underneath. Each stage keeps its own values. The CLI takes the
same chain from repeated -e, with every flag going to the stage whose
effect declares it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
