GIMP Now Moving Full Steam Ahead With Their GTK3 Port

Following last week's huge GIMP 2.10 release, it looks like the next stable version will indeed be the long-desired GIMP 3.0.

Prominent GIMP contributor ZeMarmot tweeted today that they are now working on getting rid of deprecated data and APIs, GTK2 idiosyncrasies, and more for GIMP 3.0.

After release of @GIMP_Official 2.10, extermination of deprecated data and API, GTK+2 idiosyncrasies, etc. for GIMP 3 has started.
"Exterminaaaate!" pic.twitter.com/7kdGGmzDus

— ZeMarmot (@zemarmot) May 1, 2018

As a follow-up tweet, the GIMP channel also confirmed that while the work is currently going into the gtk3-port Git branch, it will "soon to be master."

So it's looking like the next release will indeed be GIMP 3.0 with the GTK3 tool-kit support. "GIMP 3.0" has been talked about for years and it's great to see concerted work on it now beginning and that it will be merged to master soon, making it the next release. But considering the past GIMP release cadence, it may still be years before we see GIMP 3.0.0 debut as stable. The GTK3 port/branch was started back in 2012 but has gone through periods of dormancy. The developers have previously expressed the possibility they may re-tool to focus on GTK+ 4.0, which may be released by the end of 2018, but for now at least it appears they are targeting GTK3.

Other work items that have been listed on the GIMP Roadmap for 3.0 have also included improved animation support, and other features around the GTK3 tool-kit handling like better Wacom input device support, HiDPI interfaces, and Wayland support.

While waiting for the code to be merged to master, you can track the process of their GTK3 upbringing via the gtk3-port branch.