Hi, all,

I've been studifying on ofnuts' path-technologies, and one thing struck out at my eye, looking at all the dazzlying array of everyone's dumbstriking compositions:

<cue the drumroll>

* If every plugin/script had a mechanism to save and load all its parameters in a standard ASCII format, those could be passed back and forth, and edited for effect, eliminating all the overhead involved in screenshotting and much of the confusion regarding proper use (and ALL of that Frustration associated with "How did I ever get it to do dat in de first place?"). These 'hint-files' would be stored in the same folders, with the same filenames as the plugins/scripts. *

This is my vision. (But note the thing about sitting on my glasses...)

It'd be like Keyboard GIMPing... (G'MIC'd be a great place to start. I often screenshot my choices there before closing--and then promptly mislay the files.)

(The Thinker-up of this New Idea will now be taking warm pats on the back in the vestibule.)

for G'mic it's very easy: just click on the + to add that filter to your preferred ones, and G'mic will store it with your parameters

for plug-ins in python, there is a .ini file available, but I'm not an expert on that, ask Ofnuts

@dinasset

Thanks! (I remembered about G'mic as soon as I read what you wrote. I only forgot. But even there, it would be tedious to communicate my G'mic filter settings to you, no?)

if you go to (Windows user):
(your-user)>AppData>Roaming>gmic
you find the file gimp_faves
you can share this one (or just one line specific to the filter you look at)

Thank you for the enlightenment!

Thinking that GIMP doesn't play favorites by OS, I hunted, and found two, in Linux: both (.hidden) files:
(user's-account)/.gmic-faves
(user's-account)/.config/gmic/.gimp-faves

The first one is older than the second, and might represent a change in G'mic's philosophy about the saving of these.

They are ASCII files, and appear to use braces { } for separating field names and parameters.

Inasmuch as G'mic has named the file .gimp_faves, I suppose the file, and format, are offered to all scripters to use.

@gramp

GMic has what you need. When you use it, set "output messages" to "Verbose (layer name). This will put the entire command with parameters in the new layer name. You can than go back to Gimp select filters/Gmic/utility/recover preset from layer names. Give it the name you want and it will save a text file with the entire command.

THIS Gmic IS NOT THE ONE TO CALL THE FILTER. On my system, it is a little higher up the list, under "Alpha to Logo"

Where the text file is varies by system, but I simply named the first one "testing1234" and than did a file search for that name. Then you know where they are for the future.

Wow.

So sophisticated. (In my case, it would make screenshot still attractive as an alternative.)

And thanks for the tip about naming and hunting for a specific filename.

Consider:

• The script saves every time, and you are quickly facing several scores of settings, trying to remember which one is the good one.
• There is a button is in the script dialog to ask to save the data, but then you make this choice *before* seeing the result. So you can save worthless data, or forget to save important data.

My scripts that produce new objects (paths, layers...) try as much as possible to summarize the options used in the name of the new object.

And I agree, I don't want to save everytime--but I would like to save, as an afterthought, and after seeing the impressive results, the settings which would let me achieve those same results again (as you put it elsewhere about comments in your code, "six months from now") with a reasonable name (for example, 'scriptname_artname'), a set that gave me a particularly joyful effect.



Indeed, and thank you. I don't think I am mean to suggest what I am suggesting is an alternative to that.