(Niels Giesen - between parentheses)

Well, I’ve decided to get this marriage between Emacs and the GIMP off my back. I came to the conclusion that I’d better release this, as otherwise I’ll just keep on adding features and will never release. Gimp Mode is a new mode for Emacs for interacting with the GIMP. For those who do not know either (or one of those), let me explain: the GIMP is a program to manipulate images (think Photoshop - but free, as in speech and in beer), and Emacs is a text editor. Both of these programs can be extended by the user. That means anyone can write scripts (or “plugins” - technicalities aside) to give those programs more functionality.  While the scripts written for the GIMP are mainly geared towards image creation and manipulation, the extensions that Emacs has gained over the years cover not only things like text-editing for various programming languages, but also browsing the web, readin’ ‘n’ ritin’ mail, listening to music (mingus hums happily…) and on and on and on the list goes.  It can interact with external programs to get and send data, and present it in a uniform way to the user. And this is in fact what GimpMode does: it interacts with the GIMP, the GIMP will tell it its capabilities, and run commands right from the source code. Stuff like that.

GimpMode’s first and foremost aim is discoverability, as I think that lack thereof is the most important impediment for writing any code. Actually, this was the main reason I wrote GimpMode.

Mascotte!:

(Yes I know, the horns are not really gnu-ey. I like his shirt though.)

For that reason, Gimp Mode implements stuff like smart ‘n’ fuzzy code completion (on both procedures and arguments), a highly hypertextual procedural browser integrated in Emacs (no more switching back and forth between your code and the procedural browser, cut and paste made easy) and some useful snippets. GimpMode runs the GIMP as a subprocess (or attaches to a running GIMP), making available a read-eval-print-loop to try out pieces of code interactively. The only debugging tool right now is a simple shorcut to turn tracing on and off (very verbose). Anyway, here’s the page for Gimp Mode (yes that’s a page separate from the WordPress system, so that I can easily update the documentation with my build script, using Emacs Muse), where everything is explained in detail (with screenshots!). Check it out and let me know your thoughts.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 17th, 2008 at 4:32 pm and is filed under Emacs, Lisp, software.