gimp open with

[Ryan Schmidt]

On May 30, 2022, at 18:47, James wrote:

> The gimp.dmg version behaves as expected. The macports version does not
> 
> File->save->Overwrite option is missing

I have not used gimp often enough to be familiar with the option you're referring to so I'm not sure I can advise you properly. However it may be significant that gimp can be compiled either in x11 mode or with a native macOS user interface, which we refer to as quartz mode. It may be the case that the disk image distributed by the developers of gimp was compiled in quartz mode, while the default in MacPorts is x11 mode, which may account for some of the discrepancies you're experiencing. You can install gimp in quartz mode with MacPorts by using the +quartz variant, however if you wish to switch from x11 mode to quartz mode you should decide to do so for all of your installed ports at once, and it is recommended to uninstall all ports, edit variant.conf to add +quartz, and then reinstall the ports you want. That way, ports that have quartz variants that require some of their dependencies to have quartz variants enabled will get built correctly.

In MacPorts gimp in x11 mode, I just tried saving a file, and then I tried save-as with the same filename, and it prompted me about whether I wanted to overwrite the existing file. If this is not the capability you're seeking, please clarify.


> Finder->open with gimp
> 
> Opens gimp without opening the picture. (I've not investigated, but it smells of cli phreaks ie gimp %f is not picking up the file name)
> Is there a simple fix or do I need the original dmg?

The capability of the Finder (or any other application) to tell an application to open a particular document is not implemented in macOS as a command line argument being provided to an executable; rather, macOS launches the application and then sends it an open-document event; the application must contain code to receive and process that event. (It's been that way since the beginning of the Mac operating system in 1984 (with some changes, most significantly in System 7 in 1991), long before macOS was UNIX and had a command line at all.) It could be the case that gimp compiled in quartz mode has the capability to respond to such an event but that when compiled in x11 mode it does not. In fact I would suspect that gimp has no code related to this capability at all, but it just inherits it from gtk2 which presumably either has it (in quartz mode) or doesn't (in x11 mode).