this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2025
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Under the hood I actually really like GIMP. I'm also not too bothered by there being no circle tool. My problem with GIMP is that if there were a circle tool in it, its a little too difficult to find it if it does exist.
If they had some front end re-write eventually where they just moved some stuff around and better organized the front end of the application, I think a lot more people would use it. UX/UI is really important, and I'm sure the contributors of GIMP know this as they seem to have done well to try to make the interface feel straightforward by putting stuff under menu's and whatnot, but the location of things just seems unintuitive/non-standard compared to what every other application does.
The other issue I have with GIMP is just that its development cycle takes forever compared to most every other open source application I have seen.
Not to say there is a great answer to any of this, image manipulation/animation software is not an easy thing to program by any means so I understand why it can take forever, but I just wish there was a real answer.
In the mean time, I've just been trying to get by with krita, though krita really seems geared toward digital painting specifically.
A great remedy to stuff being hard to find is that you can press the slash key
/to open a command paletteThat is interesting and I did not know that. Thanks.
Not saying GIMP's UI is great (I only use it occasionally), but efficient UI isn't necessarily an "intuitive" UI. I.E. an intuitive UI may not be efficient for a professional that takes the time to learn it and works with the UI ~40 hours/week.
True, but I prefer intuition over efficiency when I pick something up for the first time, second time, and third time, until I eventually have a good enough understanding to begin worrying about efficiency.
There are use cases for Libre office writer, just as there are for vim, even though they are both capable of producing text documents. One is arguably more intuitive while one is arguably more efficient, but if I didn't know anything about word processing/text editing and had to pick between the two, I would pick writer.
Same goes for anything else, and it's also why a decent number of text editors/software support emacs/vim bindings - so that you can use the software intuitively, and then once you understand it, you can become more efficient by using modal bindings. Same goes for GIMP versus other software. The thing about other softwares in the same genre is that they can be learned relatively easily and can also be used efficiently. GIMP I find harder to learn, even if it is efficient later.
For anyone who is new who has to make a choice as well - very few people would pick vim to start out with.
Furthermore, in this instance, I do have a decent amount of photo editing experience and have used multiple softwares to do it, but even after that, the problem I have with GIMP is that a lot of this knowledge does not transfer to GIMP like it does for other software. If I learn photoshop, I can get away with using affinity, krita, corel draw, clip studio, and other software - but not nearly as easily GIMP.
I would also argue that efficiency is equally dependent upon the software as it is the task. The workflow for digital painting, animation, and photo editing are all quite different, and no one UX/UI is the most efficient at all of them. This is why most of these softwares have modular interfaces, which is good, but I simply find the modular interface of GIMP harder to use or understand versus the rest.
Don't even get us started on Blender's UX/UI design.
Blender is so versatile, and has so many applications that you have to end up with a cluttered interface. Since the alternatives have licenses that have a steep cost, I would say that putting up with a clunky interface is well worth it.
Haha, yes the feeling is similar there, though I think I personally still had an easier time learning blenders current workflow.
I'm assuming my downvotes are people who have never used blender, lol
I only see one on your previous comment, but it could be because blender has recently started getting a better reputation for usability/learnability.
6 years ago I touched it and I was horrified, but I touched it a few times this year and found they had made some good improvements.
People who complain about GIMP have never had to use Inkscape. Now THAT is one horribly unintuitive UI.
I've never been into vector graphics, but I had reason to use Inkscape recently, and I was actually surprised by how easy to use it was and how much the UI made sense.
I have used inkscape though it has been some time. I felt as though it was not super featureful at the time so the UI felt slightly barren compared to something like Adobe Illustrator, but I don't recall having the same kind of trouble with it that I do with GIMP honestly.
You can replace GIMP with Blendee or Freecad and it works just as well
Hi, this complaint sounds vaguely familiar and I know it's just indicative of that type of problem, but can you elaborate on what you mean by no circle tool?
I haven't used GIMP in a long time but if I remember correctly there's an ellipse tool and I think there's a modifier that can constrain the aspect ratio so you can make circles. I might be wrong though.
I think what you are thinking of is the ellipse selection tool, and yes this exists and can be used - however I am referring to the tool class of geometric shapes which is quite common among other software. Basically it creates a vector (In most cases I think) shape with options for stroke and fill, and controls the same way that the ellipse selection tool does (constraints etc.).
GIMP does not have this, instead you have to go through a decent amount of trouble to get simple geometric shapes drawn to the screen, and at that I believe they are always raster.
Take these procedures as an example for GIMP.
https://www.alphr.com/make-shapes-gimp/
This makes GIMP difficult if you want to use it for some niche uses such as making a quick flow diagram, or a quick vector mask which can be changed later.