How to write a GEGL filter

GEGL filters are also called “GEGL operations” or “GEGL plug-ins”. You may see any of these naming, though they usually refer to the same thing.

Such filters will appear automatically in the list of filters available from the “GEGL Operation” dialog. What makes these very powerful is that they provide automatic on-canvas previews, with split view, and they are not specific to a version of GIMP (your GEGL operation will be usable in GIMP 2.10, 2.99, or even any other software using GEGL if they have a generic operation interface).

For a proper introduction and an up-to-date creation process, we advise reading this 2022/2023 tutorial by Liam Quin in 3 parts:

• Using GEGL Plug-Ins
• GEGL Graph
• Writing C Plug-Ins

Installing GEGL filters

Apart from the standard operations bundled with GEGL, it will search for custom operations in:

• Folders listed in the GEGL_PATH environment variable if it exists, overriding all other standard paths.

• The user data directory:

  • Linux and most UNIXes (except macOS, see below): $XDG_DATA_HOME/gegl-0.4/plug-ins/

    Note: this path defaults to $HOME/.local/share/gegl-0.4/plug-ins if XDG_DATA_HOME environment variable is not set (see the XDG Base Directory Specification).

  • Windows: %LOCALAPPDATA%\gegl-0.4\plug-ins

    Note 1: %LOCALAPPDATA% can be directly used in your file browser and represents the local application data.
    Very often, the directory will be: C:\Users\<UserLogin>\AppData\Local\gegl-0.4\plug-ins\

    Note 2: if the XDG_DATA_HOME environment variable is set, it is used instead of %LOCALAPPDATA%.

  • macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/gegl-0.4/plug-ins/