Restoring GIMP settings after the 3.0 update

After updating my system I was greeted with the amazing release of GIMP 3.0. The interface was ported to GTK3 which matches the program nicely with my system theme, and I’m very excited to try out non-destructive filters. As happened with many GIMP releases, some default settings were changed, and there’s going to be some people who prefer the previous settings, and would like to change them back. I’m one of those people.

Decreased padding on toolbox buttons

The first change I came across was the padding on the toolbox buttons. In 3.0 the padding increased quite a bit. In fact, so much, that with the toolbar width unchanged, the GIMP window was too tall to fit on to my screen.

Using the GTK Inspector I dug around in the css, and decreased the padding on the buttons.

After creating a custom theme with the decreased padding, the icons were stuck at a low resolution, and the ‘Override icon sizes set by the theme’ setting did not fix this. I applied the smaller padding by opening the default theme¹, and editing its common.css file to add the following lines.

Note: This will be overwritten by future GIMP updates

@import url("../System/gimp.css");

+ /* Start TWEAKS */
+ .image-button {
+ 	padding: 1px;
+ }
+ /* end TWEAKS */

Re-introducing floating selections

Another annoying change for me was the choice to remove floating selections. (In GIMP 2.10, when cutting and pasting a selection, it would be placed on a new layer called a ‘Floating Selection’. This Floating Selection could be moved around without exiting the Rectangle Selection tool, and anchored/flattened to the layer below it, by clicking once outside the layer.)

In GIMP 3.0, this can changed back by going to Edit -> Keyboard Shortcuts and searching for ‘paste’.

Here, double-click on the ‘Shortcut’ field of ‘Paste as Floating Data’, and press Ctrl+V to assign the shortcut. Then, press ‘Reassign shortcut’ on the following popup:

.