How to write a plug-in

GIMP is powerful, but what makes it even more powerful is its extensibility. In this series of articles, I will focus on programmatic extensibility through code (plug-ins, scripts…).

You may also be interested into the How to write a filter tutorial which is yet another way to extend GIMP programmatically.

Tutorial for GIMP 3.0 Plug-ins

These tutorials will take you through the general plug-in architecture only. There is much more to the abilities of our libraries which you should discover by reading more advanced documentation or the API reference.

  1. C plug-ins - basic
  2. C plug-in GUI
  3. C - complex GUI
  4. Calling a plug-in from another (PDB)
  5. Python plug-ins
  6. Script-Fu plug-ins
  7. Calling GEGL Operations from plug-ins

We do suggest for you to read through the whole parts of the tutorial, in the given order, even if you are only interested by specific part. For instance if you want to write a Python or Script-Fu plug-in, the C tutorial stays of interest. You may then skip the “[Code]” sections and read at least the “[Theory]” parts.