In Search of GIMP for the Mac

One of the reasons I bought my first Mac (a Mac mini) several years ago is that Mac OS X is based on UNIX. I grew up using UNIX/Linux and liked the idea of having a Bash command line, gcc, ruby, and other familiar Open Source tools. I'm not a huge GIMP fan. However, it has been growing on me lately as I use it more on a Linux PC. I'm quite happy using the for-fee Pixelmator on the iMac where I spend the majority of my Mac-time. I've been using the free Open Source SeaShore image editor on my MacBook. It ran fine on my old G4-based Mac mini (which sadly died after its warranty period) and the iBook I used in my old day-job. But, SeaShore seems prone to crashing on Intel-based Macs. So, I don't use it much anymore. So, I decided to take a look at the current state of GIMP for the Mac and was surprised to see that it was still essentially a straight port that required X11 windows. This isn't a huge issue, of course. But, I decided to take a closer look before deciding what to do next.

GIMP (Graphical Image Manipulation Program) is a powerful bitmap graphics editor from the *NIX world. If you visit the official GIMP for Mac OS X page, you'll find three alternatives listed:

Wilber love Apple looks it does a terrific job of keeping their GIMP port to the Mac up-to-date.

MacPorts maintains a huge number of ported Open Sources projects including GIMP.

MacGIMP.org has a server problem as I write this. So, I can't check its current status.

However, the main point is that all of these ports require that X11 windows be installed. None are native Mac ports.

I also took a look at GIMP.app on SourceForge. It looks like this project has an experimental native Mac version. However, the current stable version requires X11 like the apps mentioned above. Finally, I took a look at Gimpshop. which, yes, also requires X11. I decided to try this first since its claim to fame is that it took the easy to loose multiple open window scheme and created a single window container for GIMP. Unfortunately, it crashed under X11 for Leopard.

The next candidate was Wilber-loves-Apple's GIMP for the Mac (which I'll call WLA-GFTM). It was updated on June 6 for Mac OS X 10.5.2. This seemed like a good indication it would work. Sure enough, after a quick installation on my Mac, X11 and WLA-GFTM started up fine. I brought in a couple of images (including the screen cap shown here) to test it and was happy with what I saw (no crashing). So, WLA-GFTM will be the graphics editor for my MacBook for the near future. I'd still like to find a good free Open Source native app for it though.