My favourite GIMP plug-ins

When I used Ubuntu I normally installed a fancy package called gimp-plugin-registry that came with most of the plug-ins I liked, and then some more stuff that I never used. I had learnt to ignore that, but there was still the pain of not knowing where things were. Some filters went to "Colors", others to "Light and shadow", etc. It was extremely hard to remember where each filter was meant to be.

Now that I'm using Arch I couldn't find any equivalent package but I thought that it was OK--that way I would only install what I really needed to install. In the process I've found a couple more plug-ins that I didn't know about, so it's been quite productive.

What I've done is I've written a script that takes care of downloading the scripts from the specified URLs, placing them in the appropriate gimp folder (~/.gimp2-6/scripts in my case), and the best of all is that it also patches them so that all are under the Filters/Photo menu entry. Yay! No more wandering around menus and submenus! My brain is now happy, I can just focus on playing with the pictures!

If you want to use this script just download it (it's on my snippets repository). You might want to modify it as you wish. There are a couple of TO DO's but the file is fully functional (as long as you've got Ruby installed).

Oh, and pardon my rudimentary Ruby. It's been ages since I last wrote anything with Ruby. I still don't know what I want to use. Ideally I'd like something as easy as php but with a syntax that is a mix of Python and Ruby, and lots of easy functional and metaprogramming.

I guess my problem is that I know too much, but still so little, not enough. Maybe if I just knew one language, I would be happy with that one. In any case, I'll keep on experimenting and try to decide what I like best. Maybe my Japanese side will win over the European one? Who knows!

Meanwhile, be sure to enjoy the filters! Wooo!