Making graphical software more unixlike

If your sole purpose is to paint digitally, Mypaint can help with that. It will have a lower memory footprint and faster startup speed because it doesn't offer all the features that Gimp provides.

to not be bloated as gimp, i mean gimp for a long time loaded every god damn font before starting up

Start by implementing the display server in the kernel.

For this kind of thing to happen, a standard format should be decided upon. UNIX and POSIX had the good idea (small tools that you can compose endlessly) but a terrible implementation, because they didn't specify any interchange format. So, when you create POSIX-2 or whatever you call it, don't forget this part:
* TSV for tables (forbid \t and \n; in fact, only allow [:graph:] with the whitespace)
* Don't care about trees and graphs, they're probably not needed
* NetPBM for images
* What about vector images? svg is shit, we need something simpler
* Something to replace WAV and all its extensions that fixes its 4GB limit and all its bloat; the NetPBM of audio (the pam part, though)
Anything else?

But now you run into the same problem as that quote below: You can pipe data between Microsoft Word and Excel, but no other application. Text does not have the problem of obscurity, and if you have incompatibilities you can simply insert some short AWK script or something in-between the two programs to format the output of one into suitable input for the other.

I thought Gimp uses its own Scheme-like scripting system called Script-Fu or Python, not Guile?

How hard would it be to replace the Gimp UI? I feel like the thing holding Gimp back the most is its interface.

LOL

It's a set of programs

Sorry I got it wrong. Gimp uses the TinyScheme library to implement the ScriptFu system. It was GNU Emacs that was updated to rely on Guile rather than its own Lisp interpreter.

That was fixed. Try a new Appimage or Flatpak.

UNIX pipes are virtual PDP-11 tape drives. AT&T shills convinced DOS users that their virtual tape drives are "the only way" to do modularity and some even believe that it brought modularity into programming, which are bullshit and flat out lies. Modularity is improved by not using pipes, which suck.

Before UNIX existed, Multics used dynamic linking to combine different segments into one process, without pretending your RAM is actually a tape drive that can only read and write one byte at a time. Segments can share code and data between programs so you can use CPU instructions and addressing instead of reading and writing virtual tapes. UNIX weenies shit on dynamic linking because their implementation sucks and because they don't want to admit Multics did it right and the UNIX way is wrong.

multicians.org/multics-vm.html

That's the anti-UNIX way and has more in common with Multics. If it was the UNIX way, all of those libraries would be separate processes in separate address spaces that pretend they're running on PDP-11s with virtual tape drives.

If there's one thing which truly pisses me off, it is theattempt to pretend that there is anything vaguely "academic"about this stuff. I mean, can you think of anything closerto hell on earth than a "conference" full of unix geekspresenting their oh-so-rigourous "papers" on, say, "SMURFY:An automatic cron-driven fsck-daemon"?I don't see how being "professional" can help anything;anybody with a vaguely professional (ie non-twinkie-addled)attitude to producing robust software knows the emperor hasno clothes. The problem is a generation of swine -- bothprogrammers and marketeers -- whose comparative view of unixcomes from the vale of MS-DOS and who are particularlysusceptible to the superficial dogma of the unix cult.(They actually rather remind me of typical hyper-reactionarySoviet emigres.)These people are seemingly -incapable- of even believingthat not only is better possible, but that better could haveonce existed in the world before driven out by worse. Well,perhaps they acknowledge that there might be room for someincidental clean-ups, but nothing that the boys at Bell Labsor Sun aren't about to deal with using C++ or Plan-9, or,alternately, that the sacred Founding Fathers hadn'texpressed more perfectly in the original V7 writ (if only wepaid more heed to the true, original strains of the unixcreed!) In particular, I would like to see such an article separate, as much as possible, the fundamental design flaws of Unix from the more incidental implementation bugs.My perspective on this matter, and my "reading" of thematerial which is the subject of this list, is that the twoare inseparable. The "fundamental design flaw" of unix isan -attitude-, and attitude that says that 70% is goodenough, that robustness is no virtue, that millions of usersand programmers should be hostage to the convenience orlaziness of a cadre of "systems programmers", that one'stime should be valued at nothing and that one's knowledgeshould be regarded as provisional at best and expendable ata moment's notice.