Stefaan Lippens' webface

Inkscape and the Gimp are trusty tools in my daily tool box for various vector and bitmap image editing. Being open source applications, they have firm roots in the Linux world, but luckily they are also available for Windows and Mac OS X. No wonder I have them installed on my MacBook too.

The problem

On OS X, Inkscape and the Gimp are not completely native applications, but they depend on X11.app. This extra layer makes the user experience unfortunately less streamlined than with native applications. Especially the keyboard interaction of an out of the box setup can be clunky.

The Gimp toolbox contains some buttons I never use. Because I don't like spilling screen estate, especially on my 1028x800 laptop screen, I wanted get rid of those unneeded buttons.

A first solution (available for Gimp 2.2 and later, I think) is editing the file ~/.gimp-2.2/toolrc. Close the Gimp first if you do this, because the Gimp overwrites the file on exiting and your customizing only takes effect after restart.

I learned another, more graphical solution (also available for Gimp 2.2 and later, I assume) from a video from Jakub 'jimmac' Steiner's blog. In short starting from the toolbox: file > preferences > interface > configure keyboard shortcuts > tools > choose a shortcut (e.g. "F7") for "show in toolbox" and return to the Gimp. With this shortcut you can now toggle the visibility of the current tool in the toolbox.