Interview with Øyvind Kolås, GIMP developer (2017)
gimp.org
gimp.org
> [Øyvind] is the maintainer of GEGL and babl, the color engines of GIMP. His work was instrumental in (among many other things) the long-waited non-destructive filters implemented in GIMP 3.0
The interview is about Pippin's background (fine arts) and current (as of the time of the interview) work, and in some details about the graphics engine underneath GIMP (GEGL).
FWIW, it doesn't touch on the UI/UX side at all. So even you Photoshop lovers may find it interesting :)
>In my honest opinion, GIMP is a horrific piece of software.
Both are absolutely true!
GIMP has been, for many years, the best free graphics software available. At the same time, it's so horribly anti-user (and anti-usability) that if it wasn't free software, the company behind it would have gone bankrupt a long time ago.
I have used far worse software from commercial outfits. You would not believe how much aerospace and specialized CAD stuff still uses Motif and doesn't support scroll wheels or extra mouse buttons.
[1]gave up on it 10 years ago, so don't know, maybe things changed
For those of you who daily drive GIMP, well you'll be up to speed quickly. For those of us that use it once a month or so, for a day, it quickly becomes exceptionally annoying.
I'm happy if the UI isn't the best. I frankly don't care what the software looks like, or if the GUI is purdy. I just want it to work, work well, and frankly that menu items don't magically disappear, get merged into other sub-menus, or that now you can suddenly close a tool, and never ever get it back without finding some obscure menu item to re-activate it.
And if you use GIMP frequently, and are about to say "But, that's easy, you just..." then you're not a casual user.
There are more casual users than you think.
(this goes right up there with devs who change config options in files from option= to Option=, and configs= to config=.
I mean, leave it alone. Forever.
"Updated config options to bring them inline with StudlyCaps" or whatever turns my day into a ragefest filled anxiety attack on upgrade.
"Changed all config names to US English from British spelling." What?! OK b112, you now have to deal.
I don't want to deal. I want to eat doritos.)
We try to be respectful of existing users (and again, we get lots of complaints that doing so "holds GIMP back"). If you have some examples of massive changes you've dealt with (and from what version to what version), I'm happy to look into them further.
I believe GIMP's deep seated NIH syndrome, and refusal to look at or acknowledge anything else, and lack of respect for users' requests and usability itself, are GIMP's actual deep seated problems (which the Blender project so successfully doesn't self-sabotage itself with), and I have no reason to believe it's ever going to change, because it's so deeply baked into the GIMP "culture", if you can call it that.
Photoshop doesn't have pie menus, so if you must, think of pie menus as a way to be even less like Photoshop, if that is what mission drives you instead of usability. But I think your design goals and motivations should focus more on usability and supporting users than simply spiting Photoshop.
But once you finally get tired of spiting Photoshop at the expense of usability, then why don't you finally declare Mission Accomplished, and move on to trying for once to be as good as Blender's user interface and responsiveness to user's needs?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43491589
>One example is that Blender embraced the use of pie menus, and Gimp ignored them. The Gimp team is just not open to outside ideas, and gets really annoyed when users of other tools request features from those tools that Gimp refuses to support, and reacts by digging in deeper and clinging to their bad design decisions out of frustration and spite. A really sad culture of NIH and 4Q2.
>In general and with many other things, Gimp could have been so much better and easier to use, but they systematically and spitefully ignored their user's needs and requests about so many things, while Blender did just the opposite, listened to users and improve the user interface and mouse bindings, instead of being stubborn and parochial about it. [...]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38236366
>[...] All of these ideas could be applied to Gimp too, of course, but I've found the Blender developers to be much more open to entertaining other people's ideas and contributions about user interface design than the Gimp developers, who have been historically NIH-limited and stubborn (especially about changing the name to something less offensive to the general public). At least Blender already supports pie menus well, and changed the default mouse bindings in response to user demand, and has made huge strides in usability lately. At this point I think it would be much easier to just add a great image editor to Blender, integrated with its video editor, than try to change the minds of the Gimp developers. [...]
We currently have over 13,000 user-requested issues resolved in our issue tracker, so I don't think we're opposed to user requests. :) I think that's a holdover from an earlier group of developers (there's been a lot of people coming and going in the 30 years that GIMP's been around!). We're also just limited by how fast we can implement certain things due to the number of developers. For instance, I focused on vector layers for GIMP 3.2 - a feature requested by many users! But that meant that I wasn't working on other features requested by other users.
https://github.com/Osndok/gtk-pie-menu
You might look at Simon Schneegans's repos and old web pages about gnome-pie:
https://github.com/Schneegans?tab=repositories
https://schneegans.github.io/gnome-pie
https://github.com/Schneegans/Fly-Pie
But he has moved on to cross platform pie menus with Kando based on Electron:
Show HN: Kando – A cross-platform pie menu for your desktop (kando.menu):
GIMP UI was always bad whereas Paintshop Pro (don't if you remember) and later Paint.NET each had a UI that you'd be up and using without thinking twice.
Imagine that you are a car hobbyist. You know your way around a wrench.
But then you step in to an F1 garage or even your local repair shop run by that one guy who inheritted his father's shop in the 50s and has thrown a tool away since the Reagan administration.
It's going to be possible for you to do everything that you know how to do, and even to learn some things along the way, but you're not going to be anywhere near as efficient as you were in your garage where the only tools you have are the ones you regularly use and you know the locations (perhaps roughly) of everything.
The same could be applied across any number of domains. Knowing your way around and ambulance isn't going to go as far as you might think it would in a surgical suite.
Knowing some python isn't going to get your pulls accepted in Canonical, Debian, etc.
Knowing your professors preffered citation methodology isn't going to gaurantee academically succesful searching of The Library of Congress or even the New York Public Library.
etc etc etc
GIMP represents nearly the totality of knowledge relating to image manipulation, and you can lay it out to perfectly match your personal knowledge and workflow, but it simply is not possible to have it automatically laid out to perfectly match everyone's workflow.
Could it be more intuitive? Perhaps, but moving things around now is liable to break the workflows of tens of thousands who have learned to use and love GIMP the way that it currently is.
For instance, having only ever used GIMP as my primary image manipulation tool, I can and do have some of the same complaints against [insert other software] that people routinely level against GIMP. The last time I tried to use Photoshop I spent more time in tutorials and help pages than doing actual image editting because Photoshop is as unfamiliar to me as GIMP is to a Photoshop user.
Of course such an effort most likeky would need to be a paid effort fulltime rather than volunteerr work.
It always felt sad to me it never reached the usablility/familiarity that Blender has.
Longterm, we have a roadmap item for an Extensions platform: https://developer.gimp.org/core/roadmap/#extensions
So basically, you could download plug-ins, themes, shortcut presets, etc, directly into GIMP. We have a lot of pieces done - we just need someone to focus on it to finish.
The differences are pretty substantial sometimes don’t get me wrong, but your previous experience usually carries over in more ways than it doesn’t and you’re able to get up and running with like…80% of proficiency you had on your preferred program after a month I’d say.
GIMP isn’t quite that smooth of a transition and you can feel it. I don’t think it’s necessarily a fault or something they should spend resources addressing, but it is noticeable
With GIMP 3, there are a lot of improvements! But it also breaks my muscle memory a lot. GIMP 3 is objectively better, but I find myself opening 2.10 regularly.
"And it turns out there are a couple hundred people already who would like me to continue writing code and sharing it publicly and openly. That at least sustains me roughly on the level of unemployment benefits in European countries. And I hope that this will even slightly increase – I will not have a Silicon Valley level software developer salary, but I’ll have enough money to cover my expenses."
I’ve noticed small but consistent improvements over the years. People who complain about the UX should just go use Photoshop. It’s fine. Layers work well, retouching and filters are easy. I don’t really understand the complaints.
I’m very glad GIMP exists, and I hope it continues to make FOSS haters cope and seethe for the next 50 years. Keep whining about the name please!
But there's not much use in changing the name now, you can't get that lost time back. GIMP isn't the only FOSS image editor available anymore. There are myriad of Photoshop competitors in the subscription, freeware, and FOSS spaces.
I love GIMP and I'm still using it because I've got decades of muscle memory. But I also love Krita and if I need to edit something on a work computer, I'll just use that.
Here is a typical attempt to justify the name "GIMP", demanding that society change instead of admitting the name has obviously terrible meanings:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38236618
_c3ag>first thing that pops is a phrase of some biologist regards why evolution made plants green and not blue (physically, blue can absorb way more energy from the sun)... SPOILER: because makes the plantae organisms way more stable rather than performant (which opens up less windows for failings regards evolution). i use Gimp for digital collages, dead simple pixel-art and even composing a poem book for my beloved one! and that tool if it isn't perfect for the job, is probably about adjusting expectations ¶ why society can't re-signify a offensive word?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38237328
DonHopkins on Nov 12, 2023 | parent | context | favorite | on: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?
Sorry, but the number of people who have seen Pulp Fiction, plus the number of people who know derogatory terms for disabled people, is much greater than the number of people who know technical biological terms of art.
If the GIMP developers really want to score an edgy rhetorical point about how society should get over its uptight wokeness and let them use any word they want whenever they want, and that's the hill they choose to die on, then how about they go all in, and try convincing society to re-signify the n-word by using it IN ALL UPPER CASE as the name of a hard-to-use paint program with an overly complex incomprehensible user interface for TempleOS, then come back to me after a few years and let me know how well that went.
Prejudice by Tim Minchin:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVN_0qvuhhw
At least the Blender developers finally listened to reason, admitted they made a mistake, and switched the left and right mouse button behavior, which wasn't nearly as offensive to as many people as "GIMP", whose name makes it kind of hard to evangelize around the school or office without coming off like a flaming MAGA asshole.
Donald Trump appears to mock a reporter's disability:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdLfkhxIH5Q
By stubbornly refusing to change the name, the Gimp developers have lost the right to whine and feel sorry for themselves about how unpopular it is and how nobody takes them seriously. Because in the intervening 25 years since 1998, 4chan and GamerGate and MAGA and Q-Anon and January 6 and Elon Musk have kind of spoiled the coolness and originality of that rebellious "edgelord" attitude.
If you have to explain to people, "I'm not really ableist, but I am simply participating in performance art to resignify a derogatory slang term for handicapped people or submissive S&M sex slaves as the name of a paint program!" you have already lost them.
And I say this as somebody who rather likes the gimp.
I am confused
> This interview took place on February 4th, 2017
Not really -- It invites speculation as to why they were not published for 9 years. And, are the words spoken a decade ago still valid?
I think the interview is interesting regardless if some of the details within are dated or not.
I volunteered to help with transcription, so I was given several audio recordings and started working on them. The first "resurfaced" one was Simon Budig: https://www.gimp.org/news/2025/11/01/simon-budig-interview-w...
There's about 4 more from another event which I'll be working on between coding and other things. There's definitely some material that's a bit dated (for instance, the comment about non-destructive editing), but I think it's still interesting insight into development.
This is from 2017 and it’s a throwback there no longer are such articles, now it’s all about AI.
Now if they had a nickel for everytime someone complained about the bad UI...
Some of these people can be found in this very thread.
The problem with gimp is not one of budgets, it's that many of the people involved in gimp see its current state as how things should be.
We also highlight UX/UI improvements in each new release post. Just like with coding, we rely on volunteers to help with this (you definitely don't want someone like me deciding on interfaces!) We have a couple active designers assisting us, but we're always looking for more feedback!
They will probably not attack people who want to fix these issues, but only those who leave drive-by one liner low effort comments about the UI.
It's really a shame they were steadfast in that one baffling decision. It was so self-destructive to the project. I wonder what would have happened if they stayed with their original name IMP, or found a different Pulp Fiction reference to make.
Amem
If there's one point where OSS stands like a sore thumb (derogatory) is in everything that makes it welcoming to general users
Usability. Focus. Heck, even this strawberry of a low hanging fruit like the name cannot be solved by a nerd committee apparently.
Then honestly you can't complain when people don't use your sw
Depending on the circle (including lots of circles of "general users") annoying people who are obsessed about whether something could offend snowflakes is seen as welcoming.
That's why to most people you end up looking like an asshole when you suggest they try GIMP. Then you have to apologize and agree that it's a terrible name, but a great image editing program. But the damage is already done.
It's as simple as that, just like as if it were named after the n-word. What else would you expect?
The g-word is arguably just as bad as the n-word, and it's not the sexual connotation, it's the fact that it viciously punches down making fun of disabled people.
And people who act that way and use those words on purpose are assholes.
Donald Trump mocks a reporter's disability:
I've seen GIMP deployed in British schools with no issues. We should all start being adults and stop fussing because some pixels on our screen might spell out a word that in a certain context and certain part of the world might be seen as offensive
First, it doesn't matter how much you or I or the commentator above us changes to "be adults". Only the saddest and most lonesome people will be the sole decisionmaker in every context they exist in.
Sometimes, you exist in a context where you need someone elses permission to use software. This is often the case for employed people.
Second, other adults will disagree with you. It doesn't make them any less "adults".
On the other hand, someone would not be unreasonable to consider you childish if you're so stuck up on your software opinions that you'll disparage everyone around you in the defense of your obscure preferred image editing program. Could you imagine implying to a room of peers that you're the only adult?
It's wonderful for you that GIMP's name has never been a problem for you. But there are about 8 billion people who are not you, and a few dozen of them are fellow GIMP users.
I've been using GIMP for most of its existence but I've faced difficulties trying to use it in school and work. Where I live, "gimp" is a word which means either a slur for someone with a motor disability or as a form-fitting leather sex torture-fetish full-body garment.
(For what it's worth, the G was added in order to reference the form-fitting leather sex torture-fetish full-body garment in Pulp Fiction. The program was called 'IMP' beforehand.)
To follow the above mode of reasoning without advantaging one or few languages, you would have to change an enormous amount of words in all languages, if not basically all. This is obviously not feasible.
If GIMP was a dirty word in a Native American language, or a native African language, there would be no debate. That we are debating this at all is because English has privileged status due to the Anglo-Saxon hegemony.
Hence, you are expecting us to give special, privileged treatment to the linguistic sensitivities of your dominant culture. Which is unfair, especially historically, because the hegemony was achieved by mass land steal and many genocides, which we shouldn't be rewarding by allowing further claims.
So yes, it should be expected from an adult anglophone to tolerate the existence of sordophones, words that are dirty in their dialect but not in others, especially in an international, multilingual setting. This is what it means to abstain from linguistic imperialism. This is what it means to tolerate and respect other cultures.
And to enforce tolerance, indeed it may be needed to view those who fail at this as childish.
I feel somewhat sorry to say this, but I need to be assertive here.
Look, people, this is PR. The author wondered out loud "why isn't he more recognized" and a reasonable answer is that "People like me, in America, who love free software and try to get people using it, run into trouble that could have been avoided if the name was changed."
You want your lesson out there on freedom of language, fine, that's what you all got. Just be honest about what you may have missed -- which I genuinely believe could have been a world in which Adobe was nowhere near as annoyingly powerful as it is (or at least had been).
No, it's not necessary to denigrate other people under the belief you can police others by proxy.
"Is this derogatory or offensive?" is a basic localization question that is constantly asked in many languages. Yes, including Arabic.
I generally agree about the evils of linguistic imperialism. But I'm describing the world I live in, not the one I want to create.
But that's beside the point. "Linguistic imperialism" is the wrong lens to use here to defend the name. GIMP is not a sordophone, it's the opposite.
GIMP was named by American-born English speakers with the intent to have an edgy name. GIMP was chosen in reference to the full-body sex garment, because they were college kids and that's funny when you're 23.
The intent was offense. It worked well. It's no surprise that GIMP is only well-adopted where the word doesn't carry its offensive meaning.
While it is pragmatic to chose new names to be appealing to members of dominant societies (I do that too), it is problematic when dominant groups view themselves as entitled to that, which is the case here, and which is why we have this discussion.
>The intent was offense.
First, I am not aware of any evidence that there was an intent to offend. The only source for etymology I know here is an old interview with one of the original developers where he said that he blended the words GNU and Image Manipulation Program, and soon afterwards realized that he heard that word before in a film. There was no suggestion there that he wanted to upset others.
And even if the name was really intended to be edgy, the current developers, who have inherited the codebase from the original authors over two decades ago, view it differently and dissasociate themselves from that etymology in the FAQ. This should be sufficient to close this line of reasoning.
Finally, regarding adoption: I can't tell for sure what it is like for graphics editors, but I haven't ever seen anyone not using SRAM memory and OSRAM lightbulbs in Poland because their names are sordophonic to Polish verbs about defecation (in fact, because of that OSRAM is the only lightbulb brand that I can name from memory). Or even anyone complaining about that, apart from being amused. And I wouldn't dare to demand for these names to change just because they have dirty associations in my language when read a certain way.
That's wrong on every count. The primary source is Peter Mattis' own words in the GIMP Gazette interview, January 1, 1997, by Zachary Beane:
https://www.xach.com/gg/1997/1/profile/1/
Mattis> "It took us a little while to come up with the name. We knew we wanted an image manipulation program like Photoshop, but the name IMP sounded wrong. We also tossed around XIMP (X Image Manipulation Program) following the rule of when in doubt prefix an X for X11 based programs. At the time, Pulp Fiction was the hot movie and a single word popped into my mind while we were tossing out name ideas. It only took a few more minutes to determine what the 'G' stood for."
So the sequence was: IMP (rejected) -> XIMP (rejected) -> Pulp Fiction inspires "GIMP" -> they reverse-engineered "General" as the G. The Pulp Fiction reference was the generative act, not an afterthought.
The GNU backronym came later. Same interview:
Mattis> "the GIMP originally stood for General Image Manipulation Program, but has since been dubbed GNU software by Richard Stallman (with our agreement). Spencer and I decided that GNU Image Manipulation Program is a better usage of the 'G'."
He didn't "blend GNU and Image Manipulation Program." He didn't "realize afterwards he'd heard the word in a film." He was a college kid at UC Berkeley in 1995, Pulp Fiction was everywhere, they needed a name, and the word popped into his head. He says so plainly.
Note Mattis' original Usenet announcement uses the phrase "The GIMP" -- with the definite article, exactly like the movie character is called "The Gimp." That's not how you title software. You don't say "The Photoshop" or "The EMACS." You say "The Gimp" because there's a character called The Gimp, and everybody in 1995 knew exactly which one.
Peter Mattis' original Usenet announcement, comp.os.linux.development.apps, November 21, 1995:
https://groups.google.com/g/comp.os.linux.development.apps/c...
Nobody needs to speculate about intent when Mattis spelled it out himself more than 30 years ago.
GIMP project history, written ~1998 by Seth Burgess:
https://www.gimp.org/about/ancient_history.html
The number one association most of the population of Earth have with the word "GIMP" is:
Bring Out the Gimp - Pulp Fiction (9/12) Movie CLIP (1994) HD:
>That's not how you title software. You don't say "The Photoshop" or "The EMACS."
Nitpick: The Sims, The WELL, TheFacebook are all attestable. But yeah, fair.
>The number one association most of the population of Earth have with the word "GIMP" is:
>Bring Out the Gimp - Pulp Fiction (9/12) Movie CLIP (1994) HD:
I suppose that here you didn't mean that most of the population of Earth watched and understood the English version of Pulp Fiction, or that the majority of people in the world will associate the word "gimp" with anything else than the graphics editor (certainly neither would be true), but that the second most-common association among all anglophones taken together after the GIMP editor itself is the Gimp character from Pulp Fiction.
That is not what is happening here.
> There was no suggestion there that he wanted to upset others.
As someone else pointed out, that's a misunderstanding of the interview. As I've said several times, the GIMP is named after the full-body sex garment. (It's just an unfortunate thing that the word is also a slur for someone with motor disabilities).
> the current developers ... view it differently
I would need a source for this. My understanding is everyone is aware of the name and has been steadfast by it for years.
> This should be sufficient to close this line of reasoning.
No, it is not. You imagined how the developers must feel. And even then, it does not matter how the developers feel.
> I haven't ever seen anyone not using SRAM memory and OSRAM lightbulbs in Poland
That's wonderful, but this is not an analogous situation. I don't think you're even reading my post. "Gimp" is not a sordophone, it's a derogatory term and the name of a full-body sex garment.
> I wouldn't dare to demand for these names to change
Congratulations for you, but nobody's talking about that. It's not the question at hand. The question is whether or not GIMPs adoption and investment was hurt because the images the name conjures up.
And to be clear, I don't think it's a given! The most generous interpretation is that they chose the name to deter users, contributors, and investment. These aren't necessarily measures of success.
For example, if a friend named their bicycle repair shop "Grandma's Diarrhea Yogurt Warehouse", I'd wonder why they chose that name, but I'd assume they aren't trying to run a profitable business. If they told me it was actually an elaborate acronym, we'd both know that they're acting facetiously. (Of course, this is not analogous, as 'Grandmas Diarrhea' is not as belligerent a term as 'gimp'.)
All I'm arguing for is that GIMP is less adopted and less used than it would have been if it were named better. I am describing things that we already know to have happened, and which I and others in this thread have observed firsthand. There's nothing to do thought experiments about.
I'm not either, personally. But I live in America, a pretty strong force, for better or lately probably worse. And GIMP is very good software, but the name makes it hard to recommend or take seriously. Not even in terms of "I'm offended" but in terms of "if you thought this software was good why would you name it something like that?"
GIMP perhaps could have competed with Adobe stuff, but we will never know because this name doesn't make it out the door for a number of related reasons. Don't shoot me on this fact, I'm just the messenger.
The vast majority of the outside world does not perceive the name the way you do. Even the majority of English users doesn't, as most of them learned standard English as second language at school without being taught vulgar Anglo-American slang.
If you want to pursue linguistic sensitivity, the just direction is against anglophone domination, even if impractical. We should be taking power away from the most powerful and redistributing it back to the weak, not the other way around.
So, it is the anglophones who should stop calling people using a nasty word instead of expecting international, multilingual communities to adapt to their culture.
Look, the author himself wondered out loud why he wasn't more deservedly popular. I put forth a reason why. PR is real. I understand if you really want to keep the name at the possible cost of popularity; but I don't think it's worth it. I wonder if he understood the possible tradeoff.
Our release posts now regularly feature a UX/UI section where we highlight the work being done. We've implemented a lot of low-hanging fruit and localized fixes, while we continue to grow our design volunteer group and build larger designs.