Gimp 2.4 Menu Font Dog's Cunts

The size of the fonts in the Gimp menu bar, menus, buttons, and other user interface elements is a scab which when picked off reveals a weeping mass of dog's cunts.

It's doubly annoying because I'm using Gimp 2.4, because it's the last version that remains usable before they fucked the living fuck out of the user interface, but search engines are so heavily biased towards showing only the most recent stuff that it is a pain in the arse to find anything which is specific to Gimp 2.4. Even if I include "gimp 2.4" as a search term, what comes back is still flooded with guff about later versions and has very little of what I actually asked for. Wankers.

However, having said that, it doesn't look from that guff as if later versions are any better anyway; the behaviour of Gimp itself hasn't changed in the slightest, so the basic nature of the problem remains identical, but because of the increase in the number of people who don't know what they're talking about posting crap on the net as if they do since 2.4 came out, the more recent versions have a larger volume of bollocks posted about them, and it's correspondingly harder to pick the bits of sweetcorn out of the shite.

• Gimp is a shit about this in the first place because it has an implacable determination to be contrarily different from every other GTK application, ignoring the font size that has been set for GTK applications in general and using its own instead.
• Despite ignoring general GTK settings, it does read some sort of font sizing information from random other shit that has fuck all to do with GTK. So for instance I install a different driver for the video card (without changing the card, and using the same screen resolution), and all of a sudden the fonts in the Gimp menus etc. all get huge.
• One or two other applications also do this, but in those cases:
  • They can be straightforwardly fixed with a setting in their preferences menu; or
  • They at least have an easily identified menu font size setting in their config file, so you can edit that and it's little less straightforward; or
  • They are hopelessly and irretrievably shit in other respects anyway, so I've given up on sorting them out and can't be arsed to care about the font.
  But none of these points apply to Gimp.
• Gimp has fuck all anywhere in its menus to let you adjust the size of the menu fonts.
• Gimp also has fuck all in its default config files about setting the menu font size. It sets it somehow, but it's not from generic GTK configs, and it's not from its own configs either, so where the fuck is it getting it from?
• The Gimp 2.4 documentation on the Gimp website also has fuck all about it. It says you can change themes by copying the supplied theme files to ~/.gimp-2.4/themes and editing the copies. Yeah, well, I know that. But it says not a bloody word about how you edit the copies: what parameters it understands and what their valid values are and what are their effects, etc. All you can do is fuck with the small subset of settings of which there are actual examples of usage in the config files that are supplied. If you want to configure any of the innumerable other settings, you're fucked.
• And while there is a lot of stuff on the net that purports to address the problem, it is all one or more of:
  • Fucking youtube videos, for fuck's sake, just write some fucking text you useless bastards.
  • Only applicable to something later than version 2.4.
  • Plain bloody wrong.
  • Incomplete, and what it doesn't tell you is more important than what it does.
• And the config files are a confusing mess anyway. In some places they use Lisp, in some places something that looks a bit like CSS but isn't, and some of them fuck knows; there are different names for the same thing in different places and semi-random inconsistencies in the use of underbars vs. hyphens; and the quality of the documentary comments varies from pretty good to fucking useless, or nonexistent.

So anyway I pissed around for an excessively long while and swore at it and what have you, and eventually found out a few useful things, although I have no idea how useful any of them are in relation to versions other than 2.4 or indeed even to just a different installation.

One very important thing they don't tell you is that the search path list lookup function it uses for the themes DOESN'T WORK LIKE THE SHELL. So you can't configure your own themes directory ahead of the system one in ~/.gimp-2.4/gimprc and have your own themes automatically override system themes with the same name. Instead it just fucking ignores them no matter what order you use in the search path list, and if you have a theme with the same name as a system one your theme directory doesn't even bleeding well appear in the theme selection pane of the Preferences dialogue. For fuck's sake.

So what this means is that the standard instruction to "copy a system theme to your own themes directory and edit the copy" DOES NOT FUCKING WORK. Gimp just acts like you don't even have your own themes directory and nothing you change has the slightest effect. Before you start Gimp you have to RENAME the copy to something unique; then it will show up in the theme selection pane, and then you can select it, and then you can see your changes doing things.

Why the pissing fuck they can't just have the search path list lookup work the same way that every other sodding search path list lookup does on a Linux system, so it works like you'd expect it to instead of being a random shit, fuck only knows. But even so you'd think they'd have the decency to tell you about it, instead of going on about copying themes with nary a word about having to rename the fuckers when they sodding well know it isn't going to work otherwise.

Anyway, once that had been elucidated and had passed the bleeding stupid functionality test (put in a bleeding stupid value for some parameter so you can tell if it's working by it being really fucked), the next stage was some tedious random experimentation squared, with the various different suggestions on the net for what the relevant parameter might be called, and how punctuated, on one axis, and the different possibilities for what if any boilerplate crap it needs hung around it to make it work on the other. This was boring.

What I eventually ended up with was a file ~/.gimp-2.4/themes/cockend/gtkrc containing these lines:

include "/usr/share/gimp/2.0/themes/Default/gtkrc" style "proper-font" { font_name = "sans 10" } widget_class "*" style "proper-font"

The first line pulls in the standard Default theme so all the rest of the theme stuff remains unchanged. The remaining lines make all the text in everything, menus, menu bars, dialogues, buttons, the lot, all come out in "sans 10". Fuck knows why you need all the extra bollocks instead of just having one global parameter meaning ALL THE FONT, but none of the suggestions I found that claimed to be one of those did anything.

So now I've got Gimp back to a nice neat compact font again. Hurrah.

But...

• Why the fuck do they have to make the thing so bloodyminded about ignoring all the global GTK settings and exclusively using its own fucked up shite, which still sets a stupid font size even though there isn't actually any font size configured anywhere in it anyway?
• Why the fuck don't they put all this shit in sub-menus of the Preferences dialogue, so you can edit the bloody settings, as comprehensively as you can edit the settings of all the other fucking bits of this that and who knows what down to the kitchen sink in there?
• Why the fuck do they have to make it so BLEEDING OBSCURE to find out how you do do it, with their complete absence of any documentation about themes whatsoever and even their passing mention of how to edit them being fucking wrong?

Cunts.

Back to Pigeon's Nest


Be kind to pigeons