Chapter 2.  Fire up the GIMP

Revision History
Revision $Revision: 2438 $ 2007-09-30 lexA

Most often, you start GIMP either by clicking on an icon (if your system is set up to provide you with one), or by typing gimp on a command line. If you have multiple versions of GIMP installed, you may need to type gimp-2.4 to get the latest version. You can, if you want, give a list of image files on the command line after the program name, and they will automatically be opened by GIMP as it starts. It is also possible, though, to open files from within GIMP once it is running.

In most operating systems, you can set things up so that various types of image files are “associated” with GIMP, and cause it to start automatically when icons for them are double-clicked.

Ordinarily you don't need to give any arguments when starting GIMP, but here is a list of some that may at one time or another be useful. This is not a complete list; on Unix systems you can get a complete list by running man gimp in a terminal window.

To use the command line options, you have to put them in the command line which you use to start GIMP as gimp-2.4 [OPTION...] [FILE|URI...].

-?, --help

Display a list of all commandline options.

--help-all

Show all help options.

--help-gtk

Show GTK+ Options.

-v, --version

Print the version of GIMP being used, and exit.

--license

Show license information and exit

--verbose

Show detailed start-up messages.

-n, --new-instance

Start a new GIMP instance.

-a, --as-new

Open images as new.

-i, --no-interface

Run without a user interface.

-d, --no-data

Do not load patterns, gradients, palettes, or brushes. Often useful in non-interactive situations where start-up time is to be minimized.

-f, --no-fonts

Do not load any fonts. This option could be useful either for speeding up GIMP start-up for scripts that does not use fonts or to find malformed fonts related problems that could hang GIMP.

-s, --no-splash

Do not show the splash screen while starting.

--no-shm

Do not use shared memory between GIMP and plugins.

--no-cpu-accel

Do not use special CPU acceleration functions. Useful for finding or disabling buggy accelerated hardware or functions.

--session=name

Use a different sessionrc for this GIMP session. The given session name is appended to the default sessionrc filename.

--gimprc=filename

Use an alternative gimprc instead of the default one. The gimprc file contains a record of your preferences. Useful in cases where plugins paths or machine specs may be different.

--system-gimprc=filename

Use an alternate system gimprc file

-b, --batch=commands

Execute the set of commands non-interactively. The set of commands is typically in the form of a script that can be executed by one of the GIMP scripting extensions. When commands is -, the commands are read from standard input.

--batch-interpreter=proc

The procedure to process batch commands with

--console-messages

Do not popup dialog boxes on errors or warnings. Print the messages on the console instead.

--pdb-compat-mode=mode

PDB compatibility mode (off|on|warn).

--stack-trace-mode=mode

Debug in case of a crash (never|query|always)

--debug-handlers

Enable non-fatal debugging signal handlers. Useful for GIMP debugging.

--g-fatal-warnings

Make all warnings fatal. Useful for debug.

--dump-gimprc

Output a gimprc file with default settings. Useful if you messed up the gimprc file.

--display=display

Use the designated X display (does not apply to all platforms).