(05-13-2019, 09:53 AM)dslujjj Wrote: To speed up opening, I'd like to delete some plugins. I probably don't need all of them. But which to delete?
Does anyone know of a general guide to GIMP plugins? I mean a list of all or most plugins, with information as to what each one does, which ones are essential and which optional, and so on?
Plugin data is kept in the pluginrc file in your Gimp profile. This includes, among other things, the location of the executable, and the UI menus that are used to call its entries. So you can check the menus you use to figure out what you don't use (with a lot of caution, some things like resynthesize are not used directly but used by other plugins (python scripts for Heal selection and Heal tranparency).
You will also find at the end of the lines that list an executable a large number (typically around 1400000000 or bigger). This is the timestamp of the executable (in seconds since 1970-01-01 00:00). On startup, Gimp looks for executables in specific directories (those in Edit>Preferences>Folders>Plugins). If the executable is already listed in pluginrc, and its timestamp is the same, then Gimp skips it and keeps the current registration data. Otherwise, the executable is run to acquire its registration data (menu entries, parameters...). In other words if the plugins haven't changed, that part is very quick since nothing runs. One problem though is that if you have an executable in the plugin folder that doesn't register properly, it won't be listed in pluginrc and Gimp will retry it on every startup. I once had a rogue instance of wget in such a folder, and the Gimp startup increased significantly (wget didn't return before some network time-out).
On a Mac, you can start Gimp in a terminal (especially with gimp --verbose) to see all messages generated during startup, this may help you find the slow parts. If you have the GNU ts utility, you can get a more precise reporting with:
Code:
gimp 2>&1 | ts "%H:%M:%.S"