Good news for GIMP users : GIMP 2.8 supports single window mode!

I’ve been using the GIMP application for more than 4 years now. GIMP is the best free alternative for the commercial Photoshop that I could find in the market.GIMP provides more or less the same feature that Photoshop provides, but free of cost. Even though I’m highly satisfied with GIMP, the one concern I’d was that the GIMP user interface can’t support single window mode. I.e. if you open GIMP application, the Toolbox will be in it’s own window, the main workspace will be in it’s own window and the every other dialog box you open in GIMP will take it’s own window, thus resulting cluttered taskbar and hard to manage multiple windows. The current GIMP UI looks something similar like this.

Clustered user interface of GIMP

But, here’s the good news for the GIMP users who are fed up with the non-convenient UI – GIMP 2.8 comes with the support for single window mode. Yes! you can switch between multi and single window menu easily in GIMP 2.8. The prototype of GIMP 2.8 single window mode can be seen below:

Single window mode enabled in GIMP 2.8 : Screenshot

Apart from the single window mode, there are several other user interface enhancements also planned for the next version of GIMP. Some features include comparing multiple images, thumbnail of opened images, improved pan and zoom. It is expected that all these features will be part of the GIMP 2.8 version. Even though the release dates for 2.8 version is not known yet, I hope that the GIMP team will release it soon.