Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Gimp is 25 years old today

gimp.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 271 posts

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#51

Post by Lammy »

edgyquant wrote: post #28
Lammy wrote: post #21

Fun fact: the name is a Pulp Fiction reference :) https://www.xach.com/gg/1997/1/profile/1/ "It took us a little while to come up with the name. We knew we wanted an image manipulation program like Photoshop, but the name IMP sounded wrong. We also tossed around XIMP (X Image Manipulation Program) following the rule of when in doubt prefix an X for X11 based programs. At the time, Pulp Fiction was the hot movie and a…

Eh the gimp scene in that film isn’t a good representation.

Why not? The scene itself is pretty gruesome, sure, but as far as I can tell The Gimp is there willingly :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3UyjlaBMcY

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#52

Post by mattl »

I love the GIMP. It is not a perfect piece of software but I made a movie with it and I use it every day. I’ve never had a libre alternative suggestion to replace it.

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#53

Post by agumonkey »

jes5199 wrote: post #14

GIMP is such a strange tool. I actually have used it, semi-frequently - since the 90s! The overall experience of using it has only changed a little in that time. And it gets the job done. I guess that makes it successful! What else has been so stable? But of all the software I have ever used, GIMP is the most difficult to learn. I memorized a few tutorials, this must have been around Y2K, to do the a couple things. A…

It's funny because GIMP is one of the tools I hate the most. It's really hard to describe how quickly I want to say no to just about everything that it does. I'm quite open[0] but I'd rather write perl script with imagemagik than use gimp.

[0] i can love both emacs and vi and even ed, I've used just about any 2d/3d program ever

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#54

Post by iamcreasy »

dau wrote: post #6
earthboundkid wrote: post #2

And it doesn’t look a day over 30.

they should invite the Blender people over to fix the UI for them :-)

I know what you meant, but the Blender UI is still at odds compared to most software out there.

Here is an example. One of their UI tenet is no overlapping windows. You change focus between windows by moving your mouse over them - no clicking involved. So, if you press C when 3d viewport is on focus it triggers the circle select tool, but pressing C when the outliner is on focus creates a new collection. But this behavior is not consistent. Sometimes some keys have global binding. For example, Shift Space always runs the animation no matter which window is in focus. And there is no way to know if a key binding needs a focus on a particular window. I find this behavior very odd.

Most software have either global key binding, or you explicitly change focus between windows(modes) by click on another (usually overlapping) window.

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#56

Post by mushbino »

Is it possible to contribute to the user experience of GIMP? I've tried GIMP a number of times over the past 20 years and it's just totally illogical, imo. It would be great to have an open source alternative to an Adobe product that was more well thought through.

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#57

Post by gorgoiler »

jes5199 wrote: post #14

GIMP is such a strange tool. I actually have used it, semi-frequently - since the 90s! The overall experience of using it has only changed a little in that time. And it gets the job done. I guess that makes it successful! What else has been so stable? But of all the software I have ever used, GIMP is the most difficult to learn. I memorized a few tutorials, this must have been around Y2K, to do the a couple things. A…

Adding a second UI to the codebase (with a friendlier, less conflict inducing name) would be a fantastic addition to the project.

Something along the lines of a cooperative fork, I suppose, focused on exposing a minimal set of features but keeping the underlying image processing models.

Fewer buttons. Distilled UI. Having a single rapid workflow for saving an edited PNG.

[...and this is almost exactly what Glimpse is, thank you other commenters!: https://glimpse-editor.github.io/ ]

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#58

Post by michaelmrose »

neolog wrote: post #43

GIMP's name comes from Pulp Fiction. > It took us a little while to come up with the name. We knew we wanted an image manipulation program like Photoshop, but the name IMP sounded wrong. We also tossed around XIMP (X Image Manipulation Program) following the rule of when in doubt prefix an X for X11 based programs. At the time, Pulp Fiction was the hot movie and a single word popped into my mind while we were tossing…

The only problem with IMP would be the theoretical problem of the icon might look too much like Freebsd. Sounds like a missed opportunity.

Re: Gimp is 25 years old today

#59

Post by vmception »

jes5199 wrote: post #14

GIMP is such a strange tool. I actually have used it, semi-frequently - since the 90s! The overall experience of using it has only changed a little in that time. And it gets the job done. I guess that makes it successful! What else has been so stable? But of all the software I have ever used, GIMP is the most difficult to learn. I memorized a few tutorials, this must have been around Y2K, to do the a couple things. A…

That started off surprisingly generous.

GIMP is 25 years old and still sucks. And as we have all learned over that same time span, free stuff has competition and quality controls too.

Post reply on HN