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Ansel

[TOC]

What is it ?

Ansel is a better future for Darktable, designed from real-life use cases and solving actual problems, by the guy who did the scene-referred workflow and spent these past 4 years working full-time on Darktable.

It is forked on Darktable 4.0, and is compatible with editing histories produced with Darktable 4.0 and earlier. It is not compatible with Darktable 4.2 and later and will not be, since 4.2 introduces irresponsible choices that will be the burden of those who commited them to maintain, and 4.4 will be even worse.

30.000 lines of code have been removed from Darktable 4.0 and 10.000 lines have been re-written. The end goal is :

  1. to produce a more robust and faster software, with fewer opportunities for weird, contextual bugs that can't be systematically reproduced, and therefore will never be fixed,
  2. to break with the trend of making Darktable a Vim editor for image processing, truly usable only from (broken) keyboard shortcuts known only by the hardcore geeks that made them,
  3. to sanitize the code base in order to reduce the cost of maintenance, now and in the future,
  4. to make the general UI nicer to people who don't have a master's in computer science and more efficient to use for people actually interested in photography, especially for folks using Wacom (and other brands) graphic tablets,
  5. to optimize the GUI to streamline the scene-referred workflow and make it feel more natural.

Ultimately, the future of Darktable is vkdt, but this will be available only for computers with GPU and is a prototype that will not be usable by a general audience for the next years to come. Ansel aims at sunsetting Darktable with something "finished", pending a VKDT version usable by common folks.

Download and test

The virtual 0.0.0 pre-release contains nightly builds, with Linux .Appimage and Windows .exe, compiled automatically each night with the latest code, and containing all up-to-date dependencies.

OS support

Ansel is developped on Fedora, heavily tested on Ubuntu and fairly tested on Windows.

Mac OS and, to a lesser extent, Windows have known GUI issues that come from using Gtk as a graphical toolkit. Not much can be done here, as Gtk suffers from a lack of Windows/Mac devs too. Go and support these projects so they can have more man-hours put on fixing those.

Mac OS support is not active, because :

  • the continuous integration (CI) bot for Mac OS breaks on a weekly basis, which needs much more maintenance than Linux or even Windows,
  • only 4% of the Darktable user base runs it, and it's unfair to Linux and Windows users to allocate more resources to the minority OS,
  • I don't own a Mac box to debug,
  • I don't have an (expensive) developer key to sign .dmg packages,
  • even Windows is not that much of a PITA to maintain.

A couple of nice guys are trying their best to fix issues on Mac OS in a timely manner. They have jobs, families, hobbies and vacations too, so Mac OS may work or it may not, there is not much I can do about it.

Useful links