Graphic tablets, pen displays and touch screen support

ℹ️ Note: the current document so far is mostly “current state” information on tablet support in GIMP (stable and development). Ideally we should move the document into another direction, to be about “how we want tablet support to be”. Basically it should rather be a specification on stylus and gesture support (and related technologies) in GIMP.

Stylus usage

GIMP 2.10

GIMP 2.10 doesn’t have hotplug support for GIMP. It means you have to plug your tablet before starting GIMP and avoid unplugging it while GIMP is still running.

Also you need to specifically activate your stylus by setting its “Mode” to “screen” in Edit > Input Devices dialog.

See for instance Huion instructions (these instructions would be similar on all OSes).

Linux

GIMP maintainers, Aryeom and Jehan, have worked with graphic tablets on GIMP since 2013. They used in turn an old Wacom Bamboo MTE 450, Intuos 5, Intuos Pro M, Cintiq, Mobile Studio… On X11, there are no major problems to report.

On Wayland, various issues, sometimes blocking ones, have been reported, and since then fixed for the most. We don’t use Wayland for daily work so can’t be sure, but support seems like it would be reasonable nowadays.

Windows

As a general rule, GIMP 2.* on Windows supports every tablet with a Wintab driver. Nowadays some of the newest tablets don’t come with the Wintab driver activated by default, but they often have one if you search on the constructor website, or as a switch in settings.

The below table is legacy and kept here in case anyone wants to update it. Nevertheless it is very incomplete and possibly wrong.

macOS

Though we do have bug reports at time, involving tablets, they are rarely about the tablet not working at all (see bug reports involving macOS and graphic tablets).

GIMP contributors (Aryeom as teacher, and Jehan as assistant) have also been giving university classes with GIMP, for digital illustrations and retouching. Students all have graphic tablets. No specific issues were reported.

As a consequence, we assume GIMP 2.10 has an acceptable graphic tablet support on macOS.

GIMP 2.99/3.0

GIMP 2.99/3.0 come with proper hotplug. You don’t need anymore to play with the input device mode anymore. Normally all it takes for you to be able to paint with pressure, tilt or other pen features, is to plug your tablet and start painting.

Of course, it also means you need to use an adequate dynamics, making usage of pressure/tilt, for most paint tools (though some paint tools work differently: the Ink tool has core pressure support; MyPaint tool stylus support only depends on the used brush).

Linux

GIMP maintainers, Aryeom and Jehan, have worked with graphic tablets on GIMP since 2013. They used in turn an old Wacom Bamboo MTE 450, Intuos 5, Intuos Pro M, Cintiq, Mobile Studio… They moved to using development 2.99 versions, a few years ago. On X11, there are no major problems to report.

On Wayland, various issues, sometimes blocking ones, have been reported, and since then fixed for the most. We don’t use Wayland for daily work so can’t be sure, but support seems like it would be reasonable nowadays.

Windows

Whereas GTK had historically only support for Wintab drivers, this changed for GTK 3.24.30 which added support for Windows Pointer Input Stack, based on Windows Ink backend, which is why the names are often used interchangeably.

Starting GIMP 2.99.8, GIMP detects API support and use Windows Ink (prefered) if available and Wintab as fallback.

Since we know that the Windows Ink API has sometimes issues, we also added a settings in Preferences > Input Devices, allowing to manually choose the API you want, when several are available.

As far as we understood, Windows Ink API should work on Windows 8+ and should not require specific drivers for recent enough tablets, though it may require a “HID filter driver” for older hardware.

Future possible work:

• adding RealTimeStylus API support. It can be interesting for cases such as using GIMP on Windows 7 without a Wintab driver installed. In this case, only the RealTimeStylus API is an option.

macOS

Though we do have bug reports at time, involving tablets, they are rarely about the tablet not working at all (see bug reports involving macOS and graphic tablets).

GIMP contributors (Aryeom as teacher, and Jehan as assistant) have also been giving university classes with GIMP, for digital illustrations and retouching. Students all have graphic tablets. In the 2021-2022 school year, some students even worked with 2.99 development versions. No specific issues were reported.

Our macOS build maintainer, Lukas Oberhuber, also reported proper support when testing a Wacom Intuos on M1 Mac in emulated mode:

Can confirm that I am able to get pressure sensitivity with a Wacom Intuos on M1 Mac in emulated mode.

Performance is good and seems to work (I’ve not used tablets much so I might be missing something).

As a consequence, we assume GIMP 2.99 has an acceptable graphic tablet support on macOS.

Future possible work:

• Sidecar support

Gestures in GIMP 2.99

The feature was not possible using GTK+2 so support only started with GIMP 2.99 (which will become GIMP 3.0 when stable).

Povilas Kanapickas added zooming gestures for the canvas, with 2 fingers, in GIMP 2.99.6, then rotation gesture with 2 fingers in GIMP 2.99.12. These 2 gestures are exclusive, depending on how the gesture was initially recognized. This is a choice on purpose because we thought that people may not want both rotation and zoom in the same time, but it can always be re-evaluated. Also it currently only works using touchpad. Not directly in canvas with a touchscreen.

There is also gesture support for zooming in GimpContainerTreeView (e.g. Layers, Channels, Vectors dockable), to increase the preview size in the tree listing. Finally there is gesture support for zooming in the gradient editor.

Note that we don’t have proper on-canvas gesture for touchscreens yet. I.e. that currently, fingers on touchscreens are their own input device and will simply apply the tool attached to the device (drawing, etc.). It has often been discussed, e.g. in this MR thread and with Aryeom. Basically good support could be:

• There should be a way to disable touch altogether in the software. Some hardware have physical switch for this, but not all of them. OSes or desktops also usually have settings, but you might want to disable it only for GIMP. Wandering fingers adding random pixels, or even unexpected zooming or panning is annoying for some people who do everything with their stylus.
• What we really want is a switch to either use touch for tool actions, or to switch it for canvas navigation: panning, rotating and zooming in particular. What should be the specific gesture is to be discussed, as I thought that the number of fingers could determine this (1 finger: panning; 2 fingers: zooming; 3 fingers: rotating). But apparently some OSes want to reserve 3-finger touch for OS actions. Currently, touchpad zoom and rotation are both handled with 2-finger touch.
• There was also the talk of having both painting/tool action and canvas navigation active. In particular: 1-finger touch would be tool action, whereas 2-finger touch would be canvas navigation. To be tested but I believe that if we had this, it should be optional too. Some people may want tool action or canvas navigation only.
• Other actions may be interesting too: swipe (3-finger?) to move from one opened image to another? Or to navigate through layers? And other canvas navigation actions like quick canvas mirroring may be worth it too.

This is all in discussion and we welcome patches for this to happen.