Hi, I have a suggestion to combine these three
Merge functionality into one.
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Right now, the Merge options are separated into three options, which are Merge Down, Merge Group, and Merge Selected.
I think it would be better to combine them and use each functionality correspondingly.
Currently, you can only choose one of them at a time.
- If you are in an active layer, you can only do Merge Down and nothing else
- If you are in a group, you can only do Merge Group and nothing else
- If you have several layers or groups selected, you can only do Merge Selected and nothing else
These three functions basically do the same thing, which is to merge the selected layers into a merged layer. But since the three of them are separated, you have to assign different keyboard shortcuts for each of them, and use them accordingly. If you're currently selecting a group, you won't be able to use your shortcut used for Merge Down, even tho contextually (not technically) it basically does the same thing which is merging the currently actively selected layers. And so on.
I believe combining them would make more sense contextually. And since these three (Merge Down, Merge Group, and Merge Selected) have no intersecting use case, it's even safer and even more intuitive for them to be combined into one Merge function that accommodates the three use cases accordingly based on the context of the situation.
The benefit of combining them into just one
Merge option is also that you can just assign one Keyboard Shortcut to accommodate all Merging use cases.
Here's how I envision how the combined Merge works
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As for toolbar, currently, whenever you click the Merge button, it shows options that displays the option either for
Merge (based on context) or to
Merge Visible. From what I try to understand, the intention is to show the user that it is possible to do Merge Visible if you want to. But for the majority of the time, people only want to do Merge with this button. And unfortunately, that means that whenever you want to Merge, you have to make two clicks, just to accommodate the rare occurrence where you'd want to use Merge Visible.
I believe that this could be improved. I'm suggesting that the button is now by default would be used for Merge if being clicked, and only when being held down, that it'd show the Merge and Merge Visible option. I think this would satisfy both needs to show the option of Merge Visible when needed, but also minimize the amount of click needed to do Merge making it more comfortable to use.
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Would love to know your opinion on this! Thank you so much! 💖✨
