Affinity photo as external editor - how to

Sorry to bring this up again only now, but my mac is in the shop and I finally have a temporary replacement to keep me running and wanted to follow up on a few things

  • I was taught to include full path to .app if it is not in the standard /Applications folder, but realized that it has never crossed my mind to actually try without. I tested and found that
    open -a AppName
    without full path and extension will work regardless of where the app is copied to.
    Even more surprising was to find that the AppName argument is not case sensitive, e.g.
    open -a GIMP, open -a gimp, open -a GimP all opened Users/someArbitraryFolder/GIMP.app
    without any issues, both from the terminal and from RawTherapee.
  • the Gimp.app/Contents/Resources/start path is quite unusual. Maybe it was used years ago when gimp on OS X was still using XQuartz? In any case, current GIMP.app downloaded from gimp.org doesn’t include it.
    But the default hardcoded path to gimp seems to be open -a /Applications/GIMP.app (rtgui/extprog.cc line 253) no? the path listed in Rawpedia seems to be be some fallback option?
    I think
    open -a gimp
    would be a better default hard coded option than open -a /Applications/GIMP.app because it should still work even if GIMP.app is not in the /Applications folder
  • I think there is a typo where it says “Note that you need to enclose it in parentheses” it should be “quotes”.
    The quotes are only necessary when there is a space in the app name

Hope this helps and not just confusing :wink: cheers

The Mac file system is not case sensitive by default, which would explain why case sensitivity is not a factor for the open command.

Thank you @ion12, very helpful! I simplified the GIMP and Photoshop calling code for OS X and updated the documentation:
Simplified OS X GIMP and Photoshop calling code. · Beep6581/RawTherapee@0608ad8 · GitHub
Preferences - RawPedia

Changes pushed to master and gtk3.
Could you verify that the Send to GIMP and Photoshop options work?