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About Babygimp

General

Description: An icon editor in Perl/Tk

Version: 0.42

Author: Christian Lederer

Copyright: Christian Lederer

Contact: <christianlederer@web.de>

License: GPL

Changelog

(The version numbering is somewhat arbitrary.)

Todo

History

Some time ago i switched from Windowmaker to Icewm which in my eyes is the best windowmanager for Linux on laptops. However i found the default icons for Icewm not very cool, so i wanted to create my own set.

I tried several icon editors (pixmap, kiconedit ...) but these did not have the functionality is needed and were too buggy. Of course i also used the Gimp, but i think it is nor very apt for editing small icons. When editing icons one will usually zoom in order to work on single pixels. But then one needs a preview where the changes are instantanlusly reflected. So finally i wrote my own icon editor in Perl/Tk (the only GUI i am familiar with).

The first (unpublished) version was somewhat bigger and split in several modules (and therefore needed some work to install). However finally i decided that Babygimp should be easy to install (should need no installation at all to be precise), so a packed everything into one single file which should be able to run on any Linux whith Perl/Tk installed. I really hate typing `make install' as root! Of course i have many ideas haw one could enhance the functionality of Babygimp (e.g. support for animated gifs). However i have not the time to do this, so i consider my work on Babygimp essentially as finished (apart bug fixes).

Credits

I would not been able to write this manual in a reasonable time without the amaya browser. I also want to mention some books from which i learned a lot about perl and which i strongly recommend to any perl programmer:

Sergey Pinaev not only complained that Babygimp 0.3 did not run with his Perl/Tk version but also sent me a patch. He also sent me a patch adding hotkeys to Babygimp. Unfortunately a had already started with Babygimp 0.3.1, so these patches will eventually be incorporated into later versions.

It is my intention that Babygimp should run with any Perl/Tk version on any Linux distribution without need for upgrading (or downgrading) or installing new packages (like PerlMagick). However currently i have only two systems available where i can test it: SuSE 6.3 at my home computer and SuSE 7.0 at my workplace. So please send me feedback!


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