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)
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.
There's always the GFig filter, which has existed in GIMP for a long time. :)
GIMP 3.2 actually adds vector layers, which are the basis for a shape tool (it was my "big project" for this release). We have a GSoC project idea for doing the last bit of work to make a dedicated shape tool: https://developer.gimp.org/core/internship/ideas/#implement-...
It's because each transform was "destructive" (like filters use to be by default). What link & vector layers do instead is store a transform matrix, so each transform just updates the matrix instead of actually re-rasterizing the layer each time.
We were hoping to expand that feature to all layer types for 3.2, but we ran out of time to properly test it for release. It'll like be finished for the next minor release.
I can't speak for all of us, but generally no (in terms of GenAI at least). There are concerns about generated code not being compatible with GPL, and honestly a lot of the drive-by GenAI coded merge requests tend to not work.
I see you are getting downvoted but I don't blame you for this question. I've been curious about what developers of established products are doing with LLM assisted coding myself.
Like most of us, they're certainly using ai-assisted auto-complete and chat for thinking deep. I highly doubt they're vibe coding, which is how I interpret the parent's question and probably why they are being down voted.
This is insulting to our craft, like going to a woodworkers convention and assuming "most of [them]" are using 3D-printers and laser cutters.
Half the developers I know still don't use LSP (and they're not necessarily older devs), and even the full-time developers in my circle resist their bosses forcing Copilot or Claude down their throats and use in fact 0 AI. Living in France, i don't know a single developer using AI tools, except for drive-by pull-request submitters i have never met.
I understand the world is nuanced and there are different dynamics at play, and my circles are not statistically representative of the world at large. Likewise, please don't assume this literally world-eating fad (AI) is what "most of us" are doing just because that's all the cool kids talk about.
Your IDE either uses an LSP or has its own baked-in proprietary version of a LSP. Nobody, and I mean nobody, working on real projects is "raw dawgin" a text file.
Most modern IDE's support smart auto-complete, a form of AI assistance, and most people use that at a minimum. Further, most IDE's do support advanced AI assisted auto-complete via copilot, codex, Claude or a plethora of other options - and many (or most) use them to save time writing and refactoring predictable, repetitive portions of their code.
Not doing so is like forgoing wheels on your car because technically you can just slide it upon the ground.
The only people I've seen in the situation you've described are students at university learning their first language...
I write code exclusively in vim. Unless you want to pretend that ctags is a proprietary version of an LSP, I'm not using an LSP either. I work at a global tech company, and the codebase I work on powers the datacenter networks of most hyperscalers. So, very much a real project. And I'm not an outlier, probably half the engineers at my company are just raw dawgin it with either vim or emacs.
Ctags are very limited and unpopular. Most people do not use them, by any measurement standard.
Using a text editor without LSP or some form of intellisense in 2026 is in the extreme minority. Pretending otherwise is either an attempted (and misguided) "flex" or just plain foolishness.
> probably half the engineers at my company are just raw dawgin it with either vim or emacs
Both vim and emacs support LSP and intellisense. You can even use copilot in both. Maybe you're just not aware...
When your language has neither name-mangling nor namespaces, a simple grep gets you a long way, without language specific support. Ma editor (not sure if it counts as IDE?) uses only words in open documents for completions and that is generally enough. If I feel like I want to use a lot of methods from a particular module I can just open that module.
I don't use an IDE under the common definition. All my developer friends use neovim, emacs, helix or Notepad++. I'm not a student. The people i have in mind are not students.
Your ai-powered friends and colleagues are not statistically representative. The world is nuanced, everyone is unique, and we're not sociologists running a long study about what "most of us" are doing.
> forgoing wheels on your car
Now you're being silly. Not using AI to program is more akin to not having a rocket engine on your car. Would it go faster? Sure. Would it be safer? Definitely not. Do some people enjoy it? Sure. Does anyone not using it miss it? No.
I didn't say using different technology was cheating, and metal tools are certainly part of woodworking for thousands of years so that's not really comparable.
It's also very different because there's a qualitative change between metal woodworking tools and a laser cutter. The latter requires electricity and massive investments.
Many years ago I tested a native OS/2 image editor with this feature. It also made it possible to undo an individual transform or effect in the current stack while leaving the rest untouched. Will that be possible in Gimp as well?
Yes, it's planned for transform tools and already possible with filters. Technically our transform tools are already capable of this (they use GEGL operations the same as our non-destructive filters). We just need to tweak it to not immediately commit the transform, and then implement a UI.
When does the final calculation happen then, at file save/export? Will be unexpected. Or does it end up in the final format? That's going to be a nightmare, because then you can't use GIMP to redact data anymore.
That's up to you. Right now filters work the same way - you can merge them automatically on creation, merge them at some point while working, or merge them on export. For formats like PSD, we'll eventually add the option to export as non-destructive filters as well.
We don't want to take away choices - we just want to add more options for people's workflows.
So basically, you could download plug-ins, themes, shortcut presets, etc, directly into GIMP. We have a lot of pieces done - we just need someone to focus on it to finish.
I can't speak for everyone, but as developers we are trying to emphasis UX/UI work more. We have a dedicated repo now for user feedback, designs, and proposed solutions: https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/GIMP/Design/gimp-ux/-/issues
We implement from there as we can, once consensus has been reached.
We also highlight UX/UI improvements in each new release post. Just like with coding, we rely on volunteers to help with this (you definitely don't want someone like me deciding on interfaces!)
We have a couple active designers assisting us, but we're always looking for more feedback!
It's funny to hear that, because we get a large number of complaints that we haven't changed GIMP's interface at all from 2.10 to 3.0 and that's why we're "failing".
We try to be respectful of existing users (and again, we get lots of complaints that doing so "holds GIMP back"). If you have some examples of massive changes you've dealt with (and from what version to what version), I'm happy to look into them further.
Please finally implement pie menus, like Blender has had for many years. There have been various pie menu implementations for GTK for decades, and it's always been easy to roll your own if you suffer from NIH so much that you refuse to look at or use anything anyone else has ever done.
I believe GIMP's deep seated NIH syndrome, and refusal to look at or acknowledge anything else, and lack of respect for users' requests and usability itself, are GIMP's actual deep seated problems (which the Blender project so successfully doesn't self-sabotage itself with), and I have no reason to believe it's ever going to change, because it's so deeply baked into the GIMP "culture", if you can call it that.
Photoshop doesn't have pie menus, so if you must, think of pie menus as a way to be even less like Photoshop, if that is what mission drives you instead of usability. But I think your design goals and motivations should focus more on usability and supporting users than simply spiting Photoshop.
But once you finally get tired of spiting Photoshop at the expense of usability, then why don't you finally declare Mission Accomplished, and move on to trying for once to be as good as Blender's user interface and responsiveness to user's needs?
>One example is that Blender embraced the use of pie menus, and Gimp ignored them. The Gimp team is just not open to outside ideas, and gets really annoyed when users of other tools request features from those tools that Gimp refuses to support, and reacts by digging in deeper and clinging to their bad design decisions out of frustration and spite. A really sad culture of NIH and 4Q2.
>In general and with many other things, Gimp could have been so much better and easier to use, but they systematically and spitefully ignored their user's needs and requests about so many things, while Blender did just the opposite, listened to users and improve the user interface and mouse bindings, instead of being stubborn and parochial about it. [...]
>[...] All of these ideas could be applied to Gimp too, of course, but I've found the Blender developers to be much more open to entertaining other people's ideas and contributions about user interface design than the Gimp developers, who have been historically NIH-limited and stubborn (especially about changing the name to something less offensive to the general public). At least Blender already supports pie menus well, and changed the default mouse bindings in response to user demand, and has made huge strides in usability lately. At this point I think it would be much easier to just add a great image editor to Blender, integrated with its video editor, than try to change the minds of the Gimp developers. [...]
Do you happen to have a reference to GTK implementations of pie menus? The challenge we've run into is that newer versions of GTK "streamline" and remove features, so we have to either discard things or build our own replacement (as one example, we've received many complaints about icons no longer appearing in menus in GIMP 3.0, but that was due to the feature being basically removed in GTK3).
We currently have over 13,000 user-requested issues resolved in our issue tracker, so I don't think we're opposed to user requests. :)
I think that's a holdover from an earlier group of developers (there's been a lot of people coming and going in the 30 years that GIMP's been around!). We're also just limited by how fast we can implement certain things due to the number of developers. For instance, I focused on vector layers for GIMP 3.2 - a feature requested by many users! But that meant that I wasn't working on other features requested by other users.
Our release posts now regularly feature a UX/UI section where we highlight the work being done. We've implemented a lot of low-hanging fruit and localized fixes, while we continue to grow our design volunteer group and build larger designs.
There's about 4 more from another event which I'll be working on between coding and other things. There's definitely some material that's a bit dated (for instance, the comment about non-destructive editing), but I think it's still interesting insight into development.
