Tuesday 21 February 2012

GIMP, Inkscape, and X11

For a few years now I've been using GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) to manipulate bitmap images. I wouldn't say I'm an expert and in fact I don't use it that much because most of the time I'll crop and resize image using Preview; which loads up a lot quicker. I only fire up GIMP when I need to do something "fancy". Thus I haven't been too irritated by the fact that GIMP uses key combinations like Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V rather than Apple's Command-C and Command-V. However, I've recently begun to use Inkscape to create vector images and it makes use of the Alt key for quite a number of things... and the Mac's preassigned used of that key gets in the way. Fortunately there's a solution and I found it on the Inkscape FAQ:

Both Inkscape and GIMP make use of the X11, X window system and the FAQ describes the creation of a "keyboard modifier map and keymap table" to get the Alt and Command keys working "correctly". I'm not going to re-post the information here as we can get the details from Inkscape FAQ, however I wanted to create this post as a reminder for myself in case I ever need to set it up on another computer.

If you've found this post then I guess you were looking for a solution to the same problem. Hope it helps. :-)