When people speak about the Pros and Cons of Gimp you often hear that the “multi window mode” is the most annoying point. Personally I’m used to the way Gimp handles it’s windows, especially when you work on a dual monitor setup or a big screen. But I’ve got to admit, that working with gimp on a small screen is not a fun thing to do. Gimp will get a redesign in the near future, but until then you can you GimpBox to integrate all Gimp windows into a single frame.

GimpBox is not a “new” Gimp, it’s also not a Fork like the outdated and abandoned GIMPshop. GimpBox is just a little Python script which acts as a wrapper for Gimp. I tested the script successfully with Ubuntu Lucid and Maverick. Unfortunately it looks like that it needs GNOME, users with Kubuntu told me that the script crashes…

The installation of GimpBox is easy. The authors don’t offer packages nor a PPA. But that’s not necessary, just download the script, copy it to /usr/local/bin and set the necessary right.s

$ sudo apt-get install python-wnck (Usually this package is installed)
$ sudo wget http://gimpbox.googlecode.com/hg/gimpbox.py -O /usr/local/bin/gimpbox
$ sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/gimpbox

After this you can start GimpBox via the command.

$ gimpbox

Additionally you could adjust the start menu entry inside the menus. Just change the start command from “gimp %U” to “gimpbox %U”.

Are there drawbacks? Unfortunately there are. After I changed the menu entry, I noticed that I can’t load a images from within Nautilus into Gimp anymore. GimpBox opens, but without the requested image. Another issue is that keyboard shortcuts don’t work inside GimpBox any more.

I hope that the author is able to fix those issues, because this Wrapper is a blessing for everyone who uses Gimp on a small screen.