In light of the upcoming resource manager rewrite, other details regarding the usability of these resources can be tweaked a bit. Currently gradients in the gradient picker interface are only able to be presented as one wide column of elements, similar to the Details view of the Brush Presets docker. This might be good for smaller screens, but when a user has a very large number of gradients (for example, a bunch of different skin tone gradients for use with greyscale -> gradient map workflows), thumbnails similar to that of the thumbnail view of the Brush Presets docker can be a lot more preferable to sift through. You can see that Krita already generates square thumbnails for these gradients by hovering over said gradients. What I am requesting is for these thumbnails to be put into an optional "compact view" on the gradient picker. Ideally this view setting would be saved across Krita sessions. Another addon to this can be the ability to resize the icons also like in the Brush Presets docker. For reference, this is how gradients are presented in Photoshop (not my video, credit to Dansky): https://youtu.be/t9KNYj7K2zs?t=96
I don't really like how Photoshop shows gradients... Sure we can figure something out, but not the Photoshop way, please :) Maybe just two rows of gradients (very very visible division lines)? Or even squares, but with gradients drawn horizontally.
Regardless, Deif Lou's recent work on the merged gradient widget ( https://invent.kde.org/graphics/krita/-/merge_requests/591 ) is very relevant. I'm almost considering marking this request as resolved assuming the widget makes it into areas like the related filters and the toolbar gradient picker.
And if that widget wouldn't nicely plug into those areas I've described, I think any alternatives you'd suggest would be fine.
Th Gradient Map is already compact in krita/4.3 (available in Krita Plus). For the toolbar, it needs more discussion, I guess? Anyway, it's still ongoing work, I think. Let's just close this report since it looks like it's getting there.