Install gimp with Homebrew Cask

Project links

• Homepage
• Package manager page

Commands and aliases

No executable aliases were found in the local package database.

Project history

Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis began GIMP while students at the University of California, Berkeley. Mattis announced the General Image Manipulation Program publicly on November 21, 1995, and version 0.54 followed in January 1996 with drawing tools, undo, channel operations, and an extensible plug-in system.

The original Motif dependency hindered redistribution, prompting development of a free replacement toolkit. That work became GTK+, which was separated from GIMP in 1997 and later underpinned the GNOME desktop. Community maintainers carried development forward after the original authors departed, and GIMP 1.0 was released on June 5, 1998.

The acronym was subsequently expanded as GNU Image Manipulation Program. Continued development added broad color, painting, photography, file-format, scripting, and plug-in capabilities while preserving the project's community-developed GPL identity.

Adoption history

GIMP gained an early following among Unix and Linux users, aided by its GPL license, extensible plug-in architecture, and inclusion in distributions; the project's historical account notes that Red Hat Linux bundled it beginning with Red Hat Linux 5.0.

Over time it became a prominent cross-platform free-software image editor used for retouching, digital painting, graphic design, and scientific imaging. Its long-lived file-format, scripting, and plug-in ecosystem made it a standard package in graphical Linux software collections.

How it is used

GIMP is used for photo retouching, image composition, digital painting, graphic design, scientific imaging, and format conversion. Its layered editor, selection and paint tools, filters, color-management features, and extension interfaces support both interactive and automated workflows.

Package users commonly install it as the principal free raster editor on Linux, while official builds also support macOS and Windows. Advanced users customize resources and behavior through the preferences interface, the gimprc file, plug-ins, scripts, brushes, gradients, and related data directories.

Why package nerds care

GIMP is a landmark desktop free-software package and a recurring test of how distributions package large graphical applications with plug-ins, codecs, color-management components, and optional integrations.

Its original toolkit escaped the application and became GTK+, which in turn became foundational to GNOME and a large part of the Linux desktop stack. GIMP also sits atop the closely related GEGL and babl projects, making it historically important as both an application and an ecosystem anchor.

Timeline

• 1995: Peter Mattis publicly announced the General Image Manipulation Program
• 1996: GIMP 0.54 became the first public release
• 1997: GTK+ was separated from GIMP as an independent toolkit
• 1998: GIMP 1.0 was released
• 2015: The project marked twenty years since its public announcement

Related projects

• GTK+, the toolkit created during GIMP's early development
• GNOME, whose desktop stack adopted GTK+
• GEGL, GIMP's image-processing graph library
• babl, the pixel-format conversion library used with GEGL

Sources

• https://developer.gimp.org/core/setup/git/
• https://www.gimp.org/about/
• https://www.gimp.org/about/ancient_history.html
• https://www.gimp.org/about/history.html
• https://www.gimp.org/news/2015/11/22/20-years-of-gimp-release-of-gimp-2816/