GIMP Bible

Appendix C. Customizing GIMP

IN THIS APPENDIX

• Customizing how GIMP starts

• Tweaking GIMP's appearance

• Fixing an annoying bug

Chapter 1 contains information about how to customize GIMP's behavior and workflow to make it work the way you want. You can customize keyboard shortcuts, the appearance of the image window, and even the different kinds of mouse cursors that GIMP uses to give you feedback on the tool you've selected. You can control these options from the Edit

Changing the Splash Image

Probably the easiest thing to change in GIMP is the splash image that appears when you first start the program. This is Free Software. You're allowed to take ownership of the program and make it feel like it's yours. First things first: you have to create an image to use as your splash. Splash images have only a couple specifications:

• Make the size of the image 300 × 200 pixels or more. Smaller images still work, but the text for the modules being loaded will be cut off.

• Splash images can be in any image format that GIMP can understand. However, for the best combination of quality and small file size, it's recommended that you use the PNG or JPEG file formats.

That's it. After you create your image, save it where GIMP will be looking for it. This is your "personal GIMP directory." For Unix and Unix-like operating systems such as Linux and Mac OS X, this is normally /home/[username]/.gimp-2.8, where [username] ...