Recently The new version of the graphic editor Glimpse 0.2.0 was presented, in which a series of changes related to removing GIMP brand references, as well as the implementation of keyboard shortcuts and PhotoGIMP project settings, icon redesign and more.
For those who are unaware of Glimpse should know that it is a fork of the GIMP project after 13 years of trying to convince the developers to change the name.
The creators of Glimpse believe that the use of the name GIMP is unacceptable and makes it difficult to distribute the publisher in educational institutions, public libraries and corporate settings, since the word "gimp" is perceived as an insult in some social groups of English speakers and also has a negative connotation associated with the BDSM subculture.
GIMP developers responded to requests that they did not intend to change the name and that during the 20 years of existence of the project, its name has become widely known and it is associated in the computing environment with a graphic editor (when searching in Google, links that are not related to the graphic editor are found for the first time only on page 7 of search results.)
Main new features of Glimpse 0.2.0
In this new version of the Gimp Fork, has been updated to the GIMP 2.10.18 code base (the previous version was based on 2.10.12) and file a name change, brand change, directory name change and cleanup of the user interface.
Regarding the changes that are integrated we can find that added keyboard shortcuts and PhotoGIMP project settings, which develops a modification of GIMP to provide a Photoshop-like appearance.
In addition, existing icon sets were redesigned, se replaced the GIMP logo with the Glimpse logo and a high-contrast icon set has been adapted for our own needs.
A large part of the fixes and improvements related to support for working on the Windows platform, including a new installer with the G'MIC framework included.
The BABL 0.1.78, GEGL 0.4.22 and MyPaint 1.3.1 and LibMyPaint 1.5.1 packages are used as external dependencies (MyPaint brush support is built in).
And as for the developer improvements the following changes were integrated:
- Bug fixes with previous versions.
- Added Github actions for compiling and packaging dev-g210, beta-g210, and glimpse-0-2.
- We update our documentation and create jobs to take into account the new construction steps of meson
- Included intl.dll with source code to aid Windows packaging process
- The HACKING.md file has been updated with the new build process.
- The README.md files provided in the build-aux folder have also been updated
- Deprecated babl, gegl, mypaint-brushes, and libmypaints git submodules provide for title only
- Vagrant Quick Start Process was marked deprecated and Ansible was associated with it instead.
Finally, if you are interested in knowing more about this new version, you can consult the details in the following link
Download and install Glimpse on Linux
For those who are interested in being able to install this fork of GIMP in a general way in Linux they can do it with the help of Snap or Flatpak packages. They should only have the support to install these types of packages on their system.
In the case of Snap, just type in the terminal:
sudo snap install glimpse-editor
While for Flatpak:
flatpak install flathub org.glimpse_editor.Glimpse
Now, in the case of those who have Arch Linux, Manjaro, Arco Linux or any other derivative of Arch and do not want to use the previous methods, they can install this editor from AUR.
To do this, they only need to have the repository enabled and have an AUR wizard installed, which for example in this case we use YAY:
yay -S glimpse-editor-git
Finally, in the case of openSUSE Tumbleweed users, they must add the following repository to their system:
sudo zypper addrepo https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:IBBoard:desktop/openSUSE_Tumbleweed/home:IBBoard:desktop.repo sudo zypper refresh sudo zypper install glimpse