14 ms·

Writing a Gimp 3.0 Plugin

174 points by nudin 2y ago

ludston 2y ago
As is tradition, all threads about an open source project must be kicked off with non-contributers putting shit on it unconstructively.
- f1shy 2y ago
  Fact of life: those who never do a thing, so never do something wrong, easily criticize those who actually do things, because of course, they don’t do all perfectly, and do make mistakes.
  - n3storm 2y ago
    Also remember for million time they will never use it because it doesn't have exact keys as their proprietary contents kidnapper software.
    - krapp 2y ago
      I don't know... it seems to me that most of the complaints about Gimp come from people who actually use it, because people who never use it wouldn't have anything to complain about. It also seems odd to assert that non-contributors have no right to complain on a forum where most people, most of the time, complain about things they have no direct knowledge of nor a hand in making.
      - f1shy 2y ago
        >> most people, most of the time, complain about things they have no direct knowledge of nor a hand in making I certainly see it very differently, or I would not lose time here. Indeed here is full of makers and doers. People that did things, open source, or founded a company, or something else. Also lots of knowledgeable people. Of course, is some share of charlatans, specially in medical topics, is a show… but in general I do learn here. I think you can “criticize” if you are not contributing, but form is important. One thing is to say “I don’t like it, you shouldn’t use it” another is “I use it, and I would love feature XY”
      - hiccuphippo 2y ago
        I actually use it. I don't mind the keybindings, they make more sense than Photoshop's or Krita's to me. The complains are from people that want Photoshop for free and Gimp is not that.
      - DonnieBurger 2y ago
        I use it almost daily in website content creation. Sure there are quirks, but it's a completely free image editor that can do nearly everything I need. No complaints from me.
      - n3storm 2y ago
        I made gimp tutorials in spanish, courses for teachers and demos, twenty years ago. Also Sodipodi an Audacity. I have been downvoted, but there are not enough downvoted that make me change the comments I heard and read for this year's: keybindings and CMYK and pantone, these two last from people who will never paper printed their designs.
  - dsego 2y ago
    This software has been around for almost 30 years now and is always sold as this photoshop killer and praised by open-source zealots. It's become like a religion, they can't take constructive criticism, they don't listen to feedback and if you say anything bad, oh it's easy to criticize. But sometimes a piece of software is just bad in many different ways, and over promising and trying to gaslight users into believing it's a suitable commercial software replacement is dishonest and results in a frustrating experience for newcomers.
- instagraham 2y ago
  At the same time, GIMP is remarkably not-geared at serious designers/non-codey folk. A simple fix would be to ask professionals using the Adobe suite what they would like in an open source tool that could get them to switch. Viewed at from outside, Adobe may appear like a multi-billion dollar moat of focus on prosumer products. Viewer from as a user, Adobe's software has bugs and inefficiencies that would get the average open source product shredded in the comments. It is ludicrous that Adobe still charges for such bad Ux. Of the top of my head, I'd say GIMP could get a headstart on Adobe if its builders added: - n00b user Ux option - Single panel modes for color correction with all settings in the form of a list of sliders (like lightroom) - Seamless vector/PDF editing so you don't need to bounce between 3 different softwares - Good UI for an InDesign competitor (this is a moat that Canva could easily crush if it added a few more options - but it's still worth building). Automatic layout (would really only need to follow a few simple rules - don't overhang text, match formatting, worship whitespace so the user doesn't have to break everything to add it back in).
  - deknos 2y ago
    if it's so easy, fork and build it :) "Seamless vector/PDF editing" seems especially easy.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- pjmlp 2y ago
  As is tradition, all threads about open source talk about how great alternatives to commercial tools they happen to be, and how we should all shame ourselves only by thinking in using commercial software, without any consideration why we use them in first place.
  - ziml77 2y ago
    Effectively what I was going to say. People are way too hung up on making open source software into a moral crusade that they completely blind themselves to the legitimate complaints about gaps between the open source and commercial options. They will say something like "well I don't need that feature" or "I never noticed a problem with that" and just overall get very defensive instead of simply acknowledging that the use cases of others may be different or that they have different tolerances for quirks in the software.
- xandrius 2y ago
  As tradition, the developers see themselves as gods on earth who cannot be given any sort of feedback without hurting their ego. Many other open source tools are beloved and used despite their flaws. Gimp is not built for anyone who isn't truly invested in it, making it a niche piece of software. And the direction of 20 years of a software can tell what kind of contributions would be acceptable for people. I don't think anyone coming in a redoing the whole UI would well accepted, given how little care is given to the same old feedback.
- trinix912 2y ago
  I don't see how saying "I wish GIMP had X" is "putting shit on it unconstructively". It's a feature suggestion, whether it's one that's doable given the project's resources or not. I'd say that "if you don't like it just fork it" approach has dealt way more damage to the reputation of OSS outside of programmer circles than people repeatedly asking for features or improvements.
10729287 2y ago
I really want Gimp to succeed. It's a software I've been trying to use since more than 20 years now but the UX is so clunky.... and different than Photoshop. Muscle Memory is a thing. I'm moving my main machine from macOS to Linux (which I also used partially since 20years), moving from a mac mini M1 to a lovely Lenovo M75Q-1 and so far the experience has been great. I'm a (enthusiast) photographer and I have big hopes for that 3.0 release of Gimp. I'm ready to learn something else and freeing myself from Adobe. If I can manage my workflow, that will probably seal the deal. Everything else works fine and is unbelivably smooth while macOS had been very frustrating lately.
- cadamsdotcom 2y ago
  Exciting to be trying something new! Curious what drove the switch? You say macOS had been very frustrating lately, anything that made it particularly so?
  - 10729287 2y ago
    I've always been tempted by Linux as my main driver, being myself an idealist. But making the move always been hard while I always had linux secondary machines around. My main reproaches towards macOS are weird choices Apple is imposing his users or the lack of compatibility with other systems : - Mail.app and the way it persists with its ridiculous way of handling attachements (I use Thunderbird) - Having to install additional apps to have an decent window manager or finder : Alt-Tab, Rectangle, new file menu - Not being able to pop a calendar while clicking on the clock - SMB compatibility is hell - Finder is hell - ... Too much customisations needed while Linux "just works". The recent position of the brand toward politics made me take the plunge.
- prox 2y ago
  I would love Gimp to succeed but Gimp is made by coders for coders (as you might expect from a open source program) and not by visual artists for visual artists. I don’t have a lot of hope. For years I have been using Affinity and it’s been really good, haven’t looked back. Unfortunately it’s not on linux.
amelius 2y ago
> As with GIMP 2.10, GIMP 3.0 ships with a Python interpreter embedded and will not use the system Python. This is great and I wish this was the same with other tools, like Kicad, Freecad and Inkscape.
- bobek 2y ago
  FreeCAD actually uses python for scripting. The console is a python repl. https://wiki.freecad.org/Python https://wiki.freecad.org/Python
  - amelius 2y ago
    Well the question is if it relies on the system Python, or if it ships its own version.
- RugnirViking 2y ago
  Doesn't Inkscape use its own python? I feel like I've found its python a couple times when searching for venvs on windows
  - Hackbraten 2y ago
    For me on Arch Linux, Inkscape definitely doesn’t ship with its own Python. and its source code suggests to me [0] that it shells out to any Python (or Perl, or Ruby, or shell) that it can find on the PATH. [0]: https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/blob/5c4c6d116dae5250d75d34a45f0d9220824d2e20/src/extension/implementation/script.cpp#L78-100 https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/blob/5c4c6d116dae5250...
  - 2mlWQbCK 2y ago
    It probably ships with python on some platforms. Pretty sure it does on Windows. But it does not really have a python API. Most (all?) extensions that ship with Inkscape are written in python, and it comes with some base classes and helper modules to make those extensions. But the "API" is basically "we send the current document to the extension's stdin, and whatever comes out as stdout becomes the new document". The extension, written in Python or something else, is responsible for handling all the quirks of SVG (a mix of subsets of two or more of the SVG specs) and (the current version of) Inkscape's additions to SVG. It is quite painful. I have maintained a couple of third-party extensions written in python since back in Inkscape 0.99.x days (ca 2007). Had to do several annoying major rewrites. Since there is no real API you depend on whatever happens to be in those helper classes, rarely documented and never stable. One of my extension, as do some of the first-party extensions, have to rely on launching Inkscape as a sub-process to perform some work, since there is no way to call in to the running Inkscape. If there was a real API you could have functions to call to query about the boundaries of objects, and other functions to apply changes to objects, that could use internal implementations that are already existing and that can do those things. But the way it works now (and always worked in Inkscape) is that you have to take care of everything yourself, more or less, maybe helped by some of the included helpers if you are lucky to find something that does something similar to what you want to do. Pretty much done with this. I stopped officially supporting new Inksape versions. I just tell users that the next time Inkscape messes with their not-really-API my extensions will be dead. I can still run them with old Inkscape in some virtual machine. Maybe I will re-implement everything if I find an application that has strong backwards-compatibility goals.
jhoechtl 2y ago
Gimp 3 - Duke nukem forever!
- mixmastamyk 2y ago
  RCs are already shipping in Fedora.
mirekrusin 2y ago
Isn’t it time to start providing wasm plugin support in most apps or too early?
- jeltz 2y ago
  It is already a thing in Typst.
- relaxing 2y ago
  How many layers of indirection do you need?!
ritonlajoie 2y ago
Side question : can an LLM which nas no idea of how to write plugins for Gimp ingest this page (and the links to the C api and Python api) and write code by itself ?
- dahousecat 2y ago
  If you already understand all the documentation and can prod an LLM in the correct direction every time it does something stupid then probably.
- StefanBatory 2y ago
  Why not try it yourself? ;)
isodev 2y ago
It’s time for a new name. “gimp” may be semantically correct but it hardly prepares one for a “friendly and powerful graphics editing tool”.
- beezlewax 2y ago
  It's fairly idiotic at this stage that this has never been changed. Highly damaging to the products outward appearance.
  - darkwater 2y ago
    Then, when the announcement of the name change is on the HN frontpage, tens of HNers will post their anger "the name was already well-known, this is a marketing disaster!! They should know better!" Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
    - beezlewax 2y ago
      Yes but those people would be wrong in this case.
  - DonnieBurger 2y ago
    I don't think it's highly damaging. It's an acronym. Is BBC's name highly damaging?
    - crtasm 2y ago
      BBC isn't a great comparison - it's an initialism, not read or said as a word. I can't think of an acronym example though.
      - zahlman 2y ago
        And the embarrassing meaning that some might attribute to "BBC" is also an initialism.
    - iamkonstantin 2y ago
DonnieBurger 2y ago
I'm patiently waiting for resynthesizer to be ported. Then I will make the move to 3.0. I've used GIMP exclusively as my image editor for the past two decades and it has fulfilled my needs for web development. I really don't get all the gripe around it. It's one of the most valuable free programs on my PC. Sure, it does take time and possibly customization to get yourself a comfortable workflow. But once you get it down, you can do basically everything you need with keyboard shortcuts and blaze thru editing really quickly.
- jay_kyburz 2y ago
  I tried and tried, but just couldn't make the switch. Krita made it much easier and now I'm 100% Krita.
- cmyk_student 2y ago
  I think it's already been ported, based on https://www.reddit.com/r/GIMP/comments/1i99ze0/resynthesizer_the_inpainting_tool_now_works_in/ https://www.reddit.com/r/GIMP/comments/1i99ze0/resynthesizer...
  - DonnieBurger 2y ago
    Thank you for that link! I've installed 3.0.0-RC3 and so far I'm pleased. I've noticed a few new behaviors like moving multiple layers now with shift instead of the previous layer link.
    - Andrex 2y ago
      3.0 felt a little weird for the first day or two, but as someone who likewise has used Gimp mostly for web stuff for (almost) 20 years, I really like 3.0 compared to 2.x so far. Text is slightly more finicky but way more powerful, for instance.
jrm4 2y ago
Will continue to say it, this piece of software that could be a mainstream huge deal, a straight-up Adobe killer, will never do this unless it changes its name. I've mostly given up hope on this, but it's still wild that people who work on the software just seem to very stubbornly not understand this. Whether you want to blame it on ableism, or perhaps simply "you should name your software after something/someone skilled or professional, not literally the opposite," you're preventing people like me (IT teaching, a go-between between techies and non-techies) from being able to recommend it. Luckily, Krita's here and for better or worse does the AI stuff.
- hackthemack 2y ago
  I think they should just rename it as IMP. The gnu is implied. Richard Stallman might complain it should always be called Gnu IMP (New Imp), which is fine.
- shmerl 2y ago
  It's not about the name it's about pace of development. It's extremely slow since they don't see a need for more backing like let's say Blender.
- veggieroll 2y ago
  That's probably true. But offending people with prudish attitudes or without a sense of humor is a pretty common old-school hacker goal. It serves a valuable community function by protecting the community from corporate interests, non-technical bike-shedding, and overload by "bug" reports that are actually just the user not being technical enough to use the tool properly. Edit: Also FWIW, I've had no problem introducing GIMP to church groups and in various professional settings. Double edit: since you mention schools, I should also add that I taught my wife GIMP and she had no problem sharing it in her school (US public high school).
  - CharlesW 2y ago
    > But offending people with prudish attitudes or without a sense of humor… Some folks who are neither prudish or humorless want to see the project and its contributors succeed to the degree that alternatives like Photopea has, or as Blender has in the 3D space. The project will continue to limp along until the name is changed to something without negative connotations in English-speaking populations.
LouisSayers 2y ago
Serious question: Has anyone proficient in Photoshop given GIMP a proper go and come out the other side wanting to use it?
- prmoustache 2y ago
  That was my experience 20 years ago. Photoshop wasn't the photoshop of today but neither was gimp.
  - woodrowbarlow 2y ago
    seconded. i used a lot of photoshop CS2 and CS3, as well as gimp from the same time period. for the most part i felt they were on-par with each other at the time.
- weaksauce 2y ago
  there's https://github.com/Diolinux/PhotoGIMP https://github.com/Diolinux/PhotoGIMP but i'm not sure how well that mimics photoshop in day to day stuff. hopefully they make strides in usability because it wasn't there the last time i tried it.
- pessimizer 2y ago
  I worked in prepress, so pretty good an Photoshop, and vastly prefer GIMP. The problems with GIMP are technical, there are some necessary things for some jobs that it simply hasn't been able to do, but I'm seeing a lot of work being done on them. The problem with GIMP in industry is 1) that .psd is a standard, and 2) that Photoshop has a bad UI that takes a lot of work to understand well enough to do the very fine work most people are doing with it. Nobody would want to start over even if the consensus was that GIMP was better than Photoshop; Photoshop would still be good enough. Hopefully Adobe will be user-hostile enough to lose a bunch of people to Affinity, and a bunch of people on Affinity will weaken Adobe standards in industry generally. GIMP could sneak in on the back of that. GIMP is Free Software, it only gains features, never loses them. In the long term, there's no way anyone else can compete.
  - 2y ago
aezart 2y ago
I tried 3.0 RC2 the other day and discovered that the new UI is much less space efficient. It imported my panel layout from 2.10 (which I spent a long time getting just right), and I had to completely rearrange it to get it to fit on a 1080px tall monitor. Very frustrating. Also, it doesn't detect my drawing tablet.
- thanatos519 2y ago
  I recently moved from an old Ubuntu MATE to Debian Trixie Cinnamon with 2.0 UI scaling and had the same problem. I overrode this with the environment variable GDK_SCALE=1 for GIMP and was able to more-or-less duplicate the previous compactness. The theme might have helped too - I am using Yaru-cinnamon-dark. Some themes are truly wonky, with objects changing size and forcing re-layout on hover. WTaF that should not even be possible!
- cmyk_student 2y ago
  Hi! Would you be willing to post more details on your drawing tablet (either here or on our issue tracker https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/activity https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/activity). We've gotten a lot of reports that tablets have better support in 3.0, so if there's some regression we'd definitely like to get that fixed. Are there specific areas of the UI that are less space efficient? One of the big changes was switching our GUI library to GTK3, which is suppose to scale better on HiDPI screens. But we had to recreate our theming system as a result, so if we need to tweak something we can try.
HedgehogChaos 2y ago
I wonder if this Gimp stuff can be used to work with 3D model files like TMD and TMD_TOON files.
mamonoleechi 2y ago
a bit (un)related but is it somehow possible to resize text layers without pixelating them on Gimp? i stopped searching years ago

174 points by nudin 2y ago

As is tradition, all threads about an open source project must be kicked off with non-contributers putting shit on it unconstructively.

f1shy 2y ago
Fact of life: those who never do a thing, so never do something wrong, easily criticize those who actually do things, because of course, they don’t do all perfectly, and do make mistakes.
- n3storm 2y ago
  Also remember for million time they will never use it because it doesn't have exact keys as their proprietary contents kidnapper software.
  - krapp 2y ago
    I don't know... it seems to me that most of the complaints about Gimp come from people who actually use it, because people who never use it wouldn't have anything to complain about. It also seems odd to assert that non-contributors have no right to complain on a forum where most people, most of the time, complain about things they have no direct knowledge of nor a hand in making.
    - f1shy 2y ago
      >> most people, most of the time, complain about things they have no direct knowledge of nor a hand in making I certainly see it very differently, or I would not lose time here. Indeed here is full of makers and doers. People that did things, open source, or founded a company, or something else. Also lots of knowledgeable people. Of course, is some share of charlatans, specially in medical topics, is a show… but in general I do learn here. I think you can “criticize” if you are not contributing, but form is important. One thing is to say “I don’t like it, you shouldn’t use it” another is “I use it, and I would love feature XY”
    - hiccuphippo 2y ago
      I actually use it. I don't mind the keybindings, they make more sense than Photoshop's or Krita's to me. The complains are from people that want Photoshop for free and Gimp is not that.
    - DonnieBurger 2y ago
      I use it almost daily in website content creation. Sure there are quirks, but it's a completely free image editor that can do nearly everything I need. No complaints from me.
    - n3storm 2y ago
      I made gimp tutorials in spanish, courses for teachers and demos, twenty years ago. Also Sodipodi an Audacity. I have been downvoted, but there are not enough downvoted that make me change the comments I heard and read for this year's: keybindings and CMYK and pantone, these two last from people who will never paper printed their designs.
- dsego 2y ago
  This software has been around for almost 30 years now and is always sold as this photoshop killer and praised by open-source zealots. It's become like a religion, they can't take constructive criticism, they don't listen to feedback and if you say anything bad, oh it's easy to criticize. But sometimes a piece of software is just bad in many different ways, and over promising and trying to gaslight users into believing it's a suitable commercial software replacement is dishonest and results in a frustrating experience for newcomers.
instagraham 2y ago
At the same time, GIMP is remarkably not-geared at serious designers/non-codey folk. A simple fix would be to ask professionals using the Adobe suite what they would like in an open source tool that could get them to switch. Viewed at from outside, Adobe may appear like a multi-billion dollar moat of focus on prosumer products. Viewer from as a user, Adobe's software has bugs and inefficiencies that would get the average open source product shredded in the comments. It is ludicrous that Adobe still charges for such bad Ux. Of the top of my head, I'd say GIMP could get a headstart on Adobe if its builders added: - n00b user Ux option - Single panel modes for color correction with all settings in the form of a list of sliders (like lightroom) - Seamless vector/PDF editing so you don't need to bounce between 3 different softwares - Good UI for an InDesign competitor (this is a moat that Canva could easily crush if it added a few more options - but it's still worth building). Automatic layout (would really only need to follow a few simple rules - don't overhang text, match formatting, worship whitespace so the user doesn't have to break everything to add it back in).
- deknos 2y ago
  if it's so easy, fork and build it :) "Seamless vector/PDF editing" seems especially easy.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
pjmlp 2y ago
As is tradition, all threads about open source talk about how great alternatives to commercial tools they happen to be, and how we should all shame ourselves only by thinking in using commercial software, without any consideration why we use them in first place.
- ziml77 2y ago
  Effectively what I was going to say. People are way too hung up on making open source software into a moral crusade that they completely blind themselves to the legitimate complaints about gaps between the open source and commercial options. They will say something like "well I don't need that feature" or "I never noticed a problem with that" and just overall get very defensive instead of simply acknowledging that the use cases of others may be different or that they have different tolerances for quirks in the software.
xandrius 2y ago
As tradition, the developers see themselves as gods on earth who cannot be given any sort of feedback without hurting their ego. Many other open source tools are beloved and used despite their flaws. Gimp is not built for anyone who isn't truly invested in it, making it a niche piece of software. And the direction of 20 years of a software can tell what kind of contributions would be acceptable for people. I don't think anyone coming in a redoing the whole UI would well accepted, given how little care is given to the same old feedback.
trinix912 2y ago
I don't see how saying "I wish GIMP had X" is "putting shit on it unconstructively". It's a feature suggestion, whether it's one that's doable given the project's resources or not. I'd say that "if you don't like it just fork it" approach has dealt way more damage to the reputation of OSS outside of programmer circles than people repeatedly asking for features or improvements.

10729287 2y ago

I really want Gimp to succeed. It's a software I've been trying to use since more than 20 years now but the UX is so clunky.... and different than Photoshop. Muscle Memory is a thing. I'm moving my main machine from macOS to Linux (which I also used partially since 20years), moving from a mac mini M1 to a lovely Lenovo M75Q-1 and so far the experience has been great. I'm a (enthusiast) photographer and I have big hopes for that 3.0 release of Gimp. I'm ready to learn something else and freeing myself from Adobe. If I can manage my workflow, that will probably seal the deal. Everything else works fine and is unbelivably smooth while macOS had been very frustrating lately.

cadamsdotcom 2y ago
Exciting to be trying something new! Curious what drove the switch? You say macOS had been very frustrating lately, anything that made it particularly so?
- 10729287 2y ago
  I've always been tempted by Linux as my main driver, being myself an idealist. But making the move always been hard while I always had linux secondary machines around. My main reproaches towards macOS are weird choices Apple is imposing his users or the lack of compatibility with other systems : - Mail.app and the way it persists with its ridiculous way of handling attachements (I use Thunderbird) - Having to install additional apps to have an decent window manager or finder : Alt-Tab, Rectangle, new file menu - Not being able to pop a calendar while clicking on the clock - SMB compatibility is hell - Finder is hell - ... Too much customisations needed while Linux "just works". The recent position of the brand toward politics made me take the plunge.
prox 2y ago
I would love Gimp to succeed but Gimp is made by coders for coders (as you might expect from a open source program) and not by visual artists for visual artists. I don’t have a lot of hope. For years I have been using Affinity and it’s been really good, haven’t looked back. Unfortunately it’s not on linux.

amelius 2y ago

> As with GIMP 2.10, GIMP 3.0 ships with a Python interpreter embedded and will not use the system Python. This is great and I wish this was the same with other tools, like Kicad, Freecad and Inkscape.

bobek 2y ago
FreeCAD actually uses python for scripting. The console is a python repl. https://wiki.freecad.org/Python https://wiki.freecad.org/Python
- amelius 2y ago
  Well the question is if it relies on the system Python, or if it ships its own version.
RugnirViking 2y ago
Doesn't Inkscape use its own python? I feel like I've found its python a couple times when searching for venvs on windows
- Hackbraten 2y ago
  For me on Arch Linux, Inkscape definitely doesn’t ship with its own Python. and its source code suggests to me [0] that it shells out to any Python (or Perl, or Ruby, or shell) that it can find on the PATH. [0]: https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/blob/5c4c6d116dae5250d75d34a45f0d9220824d2e20/src/extension/implementation/script.cpp#L78-100 https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/blob/5c4c6d116dae5250...
- 2mlWQbCK 2y ago
  It probably ships with python on some platforms. Pretty sure it does on Windows. But it does not really have a python API. Most (all?) extensions that ship with Inkscape are written in python, and it comes with some base classes and helper modules to make those extensions. But the "API" is basically "we send the current document to the extension's stdin, and whatever comes out as stdout becomes the new document". The extension, written in Python or something else, is responsible for handling all the quirks of SVG (a mix of subsets of two or more of the SVG specs) and (the current version of) Inkscape's additions to SVG. It is quite painful. I have maintained a couple of third-party extensions written in python since back in Inkscape 0.99.x days (ca 2007). Had to do several annoying major rewrites. Since there is no real API you depend on whatever happens to be in those helper classes, rarely documented and never stable. One of my extension, as do some of the first-party extensions, have to rely on launching Inkscape as a sub-process to perform some work, since there is no way to call in to the running Inkscape. If there was a real API you could have functions to call to query about the boundaries of objects, and other functions to apply changes to objects, that could use internal implementations that are already existing and that can do those things. But the way it works now (and always worked in Inkscape) is that you have to take care of everything yourself, more or less, maybe helped by some of the included helpers if you are lucky to find something that does something similar to what you want to do. Pretty much done with this. I stopped officially supporting new Inksape versions. I just tell users that the next time Inkscape messes with their not-really-API my extensions will be dead. I can still run them with old Inkscape in some virtual machine. Maybe I will re-implement everything if I find an application that has strong backwards-compatibility goals.

jhoechtl 2y ago

Gimp 3 - Duke nukem forever!

mixmastamyk 2y ago
RCs are already shipping in Fedora.

mirekrusin 2y ago

Isn’t it time to start providing wasm plugin support in most apps or too early?

jeltz 2y ago
It is already a thing in Typst.
relaxing 2y ago
How many layers of indirection do you need?!

ritonlajoie 2y ago

Side question : can an LLM which nas no idea of how to write plugins for Gimp ingest this page (and the links to the C api and Python api) and write code by itself ?

dahousecat 2y ago
If you already understand all the documentation and can prod an LLM in the correct direction every time it does something stupid then probably.
StefanBatory 2y ago
Why not try it yourself? ;)

isodev 2y ago

It’s time for a new name. “gimp” may be semantically correct but it hardly prepares one for a “friendly and powerful graphics editing tool”.

beezlewax 2y ago
It's fairly idiotic at this stage that this has never been changed. Highly damaging to the products outward appearance.
- darkwater 2y ago
  Then, when the announcement of the name change is on the HN frontpage, tens of HNers will post their anger "the name was already well-known, this is a marketing disaster!! They should know better!" Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
  - beezlewax 2y ago
    Yes but those people would be wrong in this case.
- DonnieBurger 2y ago
  I don't think it's highly damaging. It's an acronym. Is BBC's name highly damaging?
  - crtasm 2y ago
    BBC isn't a great comparison - it's an initialism, not read or said as a word. I can't think of an acronym example though.
    - zahlman 2y ago
      And the embarrassing meaning that some might attribute to "BBC" is also an initialism.
  - iamkonstantin 2y ago

DonnieBurger 2y ago

I'm patiently waiting for resynthesizer to be ported. Then I will make the move to 3.0. I've used GIMP exclusively as my image editor for the past two decades and it has fulfilled my needs for web development. I really don't get all the gripe around it. It's one of the most valuable free programs on my PC. Sure, it does take time and possibly customization to get yourself a comfortable workflow. But once you get it down, you can do basically everything you need with keyboard shortcuts and blaze thru editing really quickly.

jay_kyburz 2y ago
I tried and tried, but just couldn't make the switch. Krita made it much easier and now I'm 100% Krita.
cmyk_student 2y ago
I think it's already been ported, based on https://www.reddit.com/r/GIMP/comments/1i99ze0/resynthesizer_the_inpainting_tool_now_works_in/ https://www.reddit.com/r/GIMP/comments/1i99ze0/resynthesizer...
- DonnieBurger 2y ago
  Thank you for that link! I've installed 3.0.0-RC3 and so far I'm pleased. I've noticed a few new behaviors like moving multiple layers now with shift instead of the previous layer link.
  - Andrex 2y ago
    3.0 felt a little weird for the first day or two, but as someone who likewise has used Gimp mostly for web stuff for (almost) 20 years, I really like 3.0 compared to 2.x so far. Text is slightly more finicky but way more powerful, for instance.

jrm4 2y ago

Will continue to say it, this piece of software that could be a mainstream huge deal, a straight-up Adobe killer, will never do this unless it changes its name. I've mostly given up hope on this, but it's still wild that people who work on the software just seem to very stubbornly not understand this. Whether you want to blame it on ableism, or perhaps simply "you should name your software after something/someone skilled or professional, not literally the opposite," you're preventing people like me (IT teaching, a go-between between techies and non-techies) from being able to recommend it. Luckily, Krita's here and for better or worse does the AI stuff.

hackthemack 2y ago
I think they should just rename it as IMP. The gnu is implied. Richard Stallman might complain it should always be called Gnu IMP (New Imp), which is fine.
shmerl 2y ago
It's not about the name it's about pace of development. It's extremely slow since they don't see a need for more backing like let's say Blender.
veggieroll 2y ago
That's probably true. But offending people with prudish attitudes or without a sense of humor is a pretty common old-school hacker goal. It serves a valuable community function by protecting the community from corporate interests, non-technical bike-shedding, and overload by "bug" reports that are actually just the user not being technical enough to use the tool properly. Edit: Also FWIW, I've had no problem introducing GIMP to church groups and in various professional settings. Double edit: since you mention schools, I should also add that I taught my wife GIMP and she had no problem sharing it in her school (US public high school).
- CharlesW 2y ago
  > But offending people with prudish attitudes or without a sense of humor… Some folks who are neither prudish or humorless want to see the project and its contributors succeed to the degree that alternatives like Photopea has, or as Blender has in the 3D space. The project will continue to limp along until the name is changed to something without negative connotations in English-speaking populations.

LouisSayers 2y ago

Serious question: Has anyone proficient in Photoshop given GIMP a proper go and come out the other side wanting to use it?

prmoustache 2y ago
That was my experience 20 years ago. Photoshop wasn't the photoshop of today but neither was gimp.
- woodrowbarlow 2y ago
  seconded. i used a lot of photoshop CS2 and CS3, as well as gimp from the same time period. for the most part i felt they were on-par with each other at the time.
weaksauce 2y ago
there's https://github.com/Diolinux/PhotoGIMP https://github.com/Diolinux/PhotoGIMP but i'm not sure how well that mimics photoshop in day to day stuff. hopefully they make strides in usability because it wasn't there the last time i tried it.
pessimizer 2y ago
I worked in prepress, so pretty good an Photoshop, and vastly prefer GIMP. The problems with GIMP are technical, there are some necessary things for some jobs that it simply hasn't been able to do, but I'm seeing a lot of work being done on them. The problem with GIMP in industry is 1) that .psd is a standard, and 2) that Photoshop has a bad UI that takes a lot of work to understand well enough to do the very fine work most people are doing with it. Nobody would want to start over even if the consensus was that GIMP was better than Photoshop; Photoshop would still be good enough. Hopefully Adobe will be user-hostile enough to lose a bunch of people to Affinity, and a bunch of people on Affinity will weaken Adobe standards in industry generally. GIMP could sneak in on the back of that. GIMP is Free Software, it only gains features, never loses them. In the long term, there's no way anyone else can compete.
- 2y ago

aezart 2y ago

I tried 3.0 RC2 the other day and discovered that the new UI is much less space efficient. It imported my panel layout from 2.10 (which I spent a long time getting just right), and I had to completely rearrange it to get it to fit on a 1080px tall monitor. Very frustrating. Also, it doesn't detect my drawing tablet.

thanatos519 2y ago
I recently moved from an old Ubuntu MATE to Debian Trixie Cinnamon with 2.0 UI scaling and had the same problem. I overrode this with the environment variable GDK_SCALE=1 for GIMP and was able to more-or-less duplicate the previous compactness. The theme might have helped too - I am using Yaru-cinnamon-dark. Some themes are truly wonky, with objects changing size and forcing re-layout on hover. WTaF that should not even be possible!
cmyk_student 2y ago
Hi! Would you be willing to post more details on your drawing tablet (either here or on our issue tracker https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/activity https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/activity). We've gotten a lot of reports that tablets have better support in 3.0, so if there's some regression we'd definitely like to get that fixed. Are there specific areas of the UI that are less space efficient? One of the big changes was switching our GUI library to GTK3, which is suppose to scale better on HiDPI screens. But we had to recreate our theming system as a result, so if we need to tweak something we can try.

HedgehogChaos 2y ago

I wonder if this Gimp stuff can be used to work with 3D model files like TMD and TMD_TOON files.

mamonoleechi 2y ago

a bit (un)related but is it somehow possible to resize text layers without pixelating them on Gimp? i stopped searching years ago