For what it's worth, there is a built-in arrow brush in GIMP 3.2 (we updated the MyPaint brushes engine and got it for free as a result).

Copy & Paste default behavior was changed in GIMP 3.0 (I was one of the people who worked on the change). GIMP 2.10 and earlier creating floating selections as described earlier.

I've gotten equal parts praise and complaints for working on that - some people think it makes GIMP much more intuitive, while others find it interfers with their workflow of quickly copying, editing, and merging back down pieces of a layer.

Non-destructive text outline has been around for a while now: https://www.gimp.org/news/2022/11/18/gimp-2-99-14-released/#...

Non-destructive resize works on vector layers and link layers (essentially "smart objects" in GIMP). We have the capability to do this for regular layers too - just need to connect some things and change some internal assumptions about transform filters.

Huh, 2.99 does that mean it was the beta for 3.0?

Because I think i have been using stable gimp a few times over the last couple of years and not seen it.

What version of GIMP are you running? Stable GIMP at this point (at least by our definition) is GIMP 3.2, which definitely has this feature. If you've been using 2.10 or earlier, then yeah, it wouldn't be in there.

Yeah, but it being in 2.99 / 3.0 means it was only in stable gimp since 2025, so one year ago. That explains why I did not know about it.

But nice to see that they finally added it.

Possibly as part of our in-progress extension platform. The extension infrastructure is already built (e.g. you could package the theme as .gex file and have GIMP recognize it), and we have a GSoC student working on some aspects of it (at the moment, the submission workflow for an online repo of extensions). Once it's ready, we could reach out to the developers of PhotoGIMP and see if they'd be willing to have it included as part of the initial extensions repo - then you could pull it into GIMP directly.

Ah design by committee, that well known route to design excellence!

I believe it's a step up from "design by whichever developer implemented a particular feature", which was the norm. :)

More seriously, we're trying to attract more designers and design feedback, just like we do for coding. We're also trying to document UX standards (see https://developer.gimp.org/core/ for early work) so there'll be a consistent experience as new developers join and features are added.

GIMP has a Python console, and several built-in plug-ins are written in Python: https://docs.gimp.org/3.2/en/gimp-filters-python-fu.html

We want to make macros simpler (some of the work I helped out with for GIMP 3.0 was to lay the groundwork for automated/recordable operations), but as with all the things on our roadmap it takes time and developers.

I used the python API in GIMP headless early on in my career, was pretty handy.

And rectangles, triangles, and other custom shapes too I hope! :)

I'll do my best. I might actually finish cleaning up the code for the version in the video and post a WIP merge request so people can start trying it out and designing how the interactions should work.

If you mean the color icons, you can easily switch back to those in the Welcome Dialog that appears when you first open GIMP (look in the Personalize tab). It's the first thing I do when I install GIMP on a new machine. :)

oh wow, i never realized that this is there, in such a convenient location too. and you can't just change the icon style, but also disable the tool groups which was the most annoying change i found because it makes finding the right tool harder. (i'd love tool groups where the tools are grouped but not folded, or in a way where i can expand certain groups that i use often)

Thank you for this.

Also small world, floating point JPEG person here.

Ah, hey! We've been busy with getting 3.2 finished, but I plan to go back and read over your latest message once we've recovered a bit. :)

No rush - been busy over here too.

Did you also manage to enable menu icons?

That was a feature in GTK2 (the GUI library we use) that was removed in GTK3. We could try to fight the library and reimplement it ourselves, but it'd take a developer dedicated to do it. I miss the menu icons too. :(

It got deprecated only in 3.10 and you can compile against that and link it with the latest Gtk+ 3 library. I do this for my programs, because I don't like it when the widget toolkit ignores my OS settings.

The current non-destructive UI is a bit of a compromise - we can't really mix layers with NDE filters in the layer dock until GTK4 (from what I understand), so the pop-up menu is what we had to work with.

You can check "Merge filter" at the bottom of the filter dialogue though, and it will automatically merge the filter like in 2.10 (and the setting is remembered going forward)

Hi! What was the last version of GIMP that you used before 3.0?

We get an equal amount of "GIMP's UI never changes!" and "You changed too much of the UI in the latest version", so it's difficult sometimes to figure out the specific issues.

I’ve been using it for at least a decade, likely longer.

Albeit I might only use it, at most, for a few hours every few months. So I’m definitely not a seasoned expert despite that length of time. But I always considered myself reasonably competent.

I usually indifferent about UI changes, I’m not someone who tends to complain either for nor against. So this isn’t a complaint about Gimp changing thing (if that’s what happened). The issue here is really more about how I now cannot figure out the simple things any more. And that might just be on me rather than Gimp.