Make Gimp and other X11 programs more useable

Aug 19, '09 07:30:46AM

Contributed by: Anonymous

I'm in an office with a very tight IT budget so I try to push open source wherever possible. For basic image editing, I've turned some people onto Gimp. One frustrating aspect of Gimp—because it runs under X11 and is not a native Cocoa application—is that ever time you want to choose a tool from the toolbox, you have to click the toolbox to select it, and then click again to select the tool. It's frustrating when all I want to do is make a simple edit. I've just located this solution:

  1. Start X11
  2. In X11, select "Preferences...".
  3. In the resulting X11 Preferences window, select the "Windows" tab
  4. Check the "Click-through Inactive Windows" check-box and close the Preferences window.
You should now be able to click directly on a tool in the toolbox to select it, and then start working with the tool immediately in the image. No more having to first click back on the image to start your editing.

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Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20090817083346589