Have tested GIMP on two different Macs. I’m afraid it simply doesn’t work on the Mac either in practice or according to the on-line manual. The Tool box is minimal - and not in colour. The Foreground Tool (for example) works intermittently at best ( the Select and Enter functions are interpeted on one of the Macs as “Undo”); plus after a first use GIMP has to be reloaded from scratch because otherwise it won’t boot. Would love to use this program but it has clearly not been designed for use on Macs and doesn’t take advantage of (or even understand) the Mac’s functionality.
If you mean GIMP is not mac-First, no it’s not. It is a cross-platform tool, we don’t favor any OS. Now we are not against improving GIMP in regards to OS-specificities (as long as it doesn’t make things worse for other OSes), far from it. All it takes is for people to contribute. GIMP is a community software. Right now, we have only a single macOS developer, who is fixing GIMP for macOS on the side, in their free time, after their daily work. What they do is already great.
If you want more, you are very welcome to contribute. I’m sure indeed that there are a lot of bugs in GIMP for macOS and that there are ways to better make use of specific features of this OS. If anyone wants to contribute, patches are very welcome.
This being said:
We just follow modern recommendations for graphics software. You may change to color icons by going to Edit > Preferences > Icon Theme.
The foreground tool is far from perfect and has its issues (this is not macOS specific). Improving it eventually is something we want to do.
If you have more infos, bug reports are welcome. Though if it happens only on one machine out of 2, it is very likely that there is a system settings issue.
Again, bug report appreciated, but more details are needed for devs to understand what is happening.
Hi, @Jeremy_Fox :
I’m sad to hear that GIMP is not working well for you. I can tell you that I have used GIMP on my various Macs over the years, and it works quite well for me.
I am presently using GIMP 2.10.32, installed as a Mac application via MacPorts port gimp2-launcher. I can also run gimp2 as an X11 app from the command line via MacPorts port gimp2. I am running macOS Monterey 12.6.3 on a MacBook Pro with Apple Silicon (arm64 architecture).
What version of GIMP are you using? From where did you obtain it? What version of macOS and what CPU family are you using?
Let’s see if we can get your GIMP installation working at least as well as mine!
—Jim
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