[snip]

> 
> If I remember correctly a KDE- and a GNOME-compile-option would have
> been 
> accepted ...

I didn't receive any reply on my last offer. Noone event wanted to see the
patch I made.

> In spite of having used this program for a long time now: *please* have
> mercy!
> Anyone, please restart the KIMP-project -- I really hate this crappy 
> GIMP-user-interface ...

Everyone does, apparently except the GIMP developers. I always thought, GIMP was
a Photoshop clone. I was wrong. When I recently installed a Photohop demo for
SunOS it was by surprise more kgimp-like than gimp-like :-)  They also had a
proper menubar, to mention one difference. 

On the other hand, gimp development also suffers a bit from the chosen
programming language, I think.  C++ could do so much better for this task,
resulting in less and more flexible code. Qt on the other hand made it easier
for plug-in designers to provide nicer plugin-interface dialogs.

If someone here is interested, maybe it would just be the best to start a
kimage shop from scratch. The internal data structure may be designed similar,
so that it would be possible to run unmodified gimp-plugins with it. 

It's a big project, though, but as the gimp showed, there's also some
commercial backing possible for an application like this (support, selling
documentation, special extensions, etc.). The GIMP kernel application is about
130.000 lines of code. But it's very elaborate C-code with large parts dealing
with GUI. So I'd estimate that a similar application with KDE/C++ will need
much less code, maybe something < 30.000 lines.

Michael Koch's KImage (now in KOffice) is supposed to offer lightweight and
small image manipulation. But what about doing a full-featured thing as well?
:-)


Matthias