Add your own GIMP features

Why use GIMP?

One of the most important reasons for using free or open source software is that it provides an opportunity for users to select the product, allowing them to add whatever features they want or need. However, the ability to add attributes is limited by the size and complexity of the project and the nature of the available documents. So while GIMP is one of the most famous and successful Open-source software projects, its huge code base can be daunting.

To understand the content of this article, you should be familiar with the C programming language. You should also be aware or ready to learn about Git version control tools. The examples in this article use GIMP V2.7 (note that V2.7 is not a stable version of a development branch) created in a linux® environment. This article uses the Mandriva Linux version released in the spring of 2009, but any Linux version should apply.

You will create a tool based on the existing drawing tools. The tools created in this article are for guidance purposes only. To make the tool a real project and as part of the GIMP release, it must accept a comprehensive review by the GIMP core developers and UI architects.

Begin

To use GIMP, you must first build GIMP. Although it's cumbersome to check your code simply by extracting the source tarball, even with a simple way of using the Git Web interface for the code repository, it can be more cumbersome to actually build code.

Given the size of the source code, GIMP is well maintained and consistently built. However, you still need to deal with the required dependency issues. When you run software such as GIMP, many libraries are automatically installed on your system. More information is needed in addition to these library binaries when you need to build the software. Most Linux distributions package these dependencies separately from the main installation package. In addition to these libraries, you need the compiler itself and the associated toolset. In the most popular Linux distributions, you can just type in a few commands to get everything ready.

Building GIMP on Windows

It is cumbersome to build GIMP on a Microsoft Windows system because it is assumed that the Windows system also has those programs and libraries that are installed by default on the Linux system. If you are working on Windows, it is recommended that you create a Linux installation on a virtual machine to set up your build environment. You can use the Mingw32 tool Linux virtual machine to compile GIMP for Windows.

For the GIMP source code itself, you should get a development version from Git. It's a good idea to get a Git tree even if you're working on a stable version of code. This allows you to easily track your changes to your code. Git is a decentralized version control software that can be used to keep GIMP code on the main knowledge base. Although there is a graphical interface, it is designed for use by the command line.

Get GIMP Source code

To get the latest development version, simply type Git clone git://git.gnome.org/gimp from the command line. After a few minutes, you will have the complete GMIP code. The code is well-organized so that you can find directions relatively easily in more than 3,000 download files.

A Git usage description

When making changes, you do not have to worry about losing any of the original files or even your changes, thanks to the Git system, if you decide to keep them for customization. For example, to reset a file in the way it is in the GIMP knowledge Base, simply type Git checkout <filename>.

At any rate, you must be familiar with Git, even if you do not intend to give back your code. It can greatly simplify your work, even if you use it to track your changes to the code base. For example, at any given moment, you can see all of your changes to the code base by typing git diff.

Using Git correctly allows you to create local branches, and you can develop different features in your local branch and use the modifications in GIMP to update them at any time.