Darktable on the Mac

Software darktable
1

I am completely new to Darktable, having only installed it a couple of days ago. I tried to get some of my questions answered by doing searches on the net, but most of what I found is for usage on Windows, not the Mac, so I still have a lot of questions. Perhaps someone here can answer some of these.

  1. The display fonts on the Darktable GUI seem very small to my old eyes, and I have to sit practically next to the monitor to see the text that is displayed under the adjustment modules. For example, under Highlight Reconstruction the Method, Clipping and Blend entries are so small I can not see them from where I normally sit. Is there any way to increase the size of the displayed text?

  2. I wanted to use an external editor with Darktable, so I downloaded Gimp and the Gimp lua script which should allow me to call Gimp from Darktable. The script instructions say to copy it to the Darktable configuration folder so Darktable can run it at startup, but I can not find any Darktable configuration folder on the Mac. I have searched the normal places (both Library folders) without any luck. A search of the folders on my Mac does not show any Darktable folder. Can anyone point me to the Darktable lua script folder?

Any help would be appreciated.

UPDATE:

I found the config folder for Darktable. I could not find it earlier since it is a hidden folder, but I began searching the hidden folders when all else failed, and found it.

2

You need to add the lua script to darktable’s luarc file. You probably need to adjust the path to your gimp app.

3

You need to add the lua script to darktable’s luarc file.

There was no luarc file in the darktable folder on my Mac and nothing I have tried seems to have had any success.

  1. I copied the Gimp lua file from GitHub to the darktable config file and named it gimp.lua. I restarted darktable, but the script did not work. I renamed the script file luarc and restarted darktable, but it still did not work.

  2. I created a lua folder under the darktable config folder, and did the above two steps, but it still did not work.

  3. I tried using a folder named luarc instead of lua, and used the same two file names, but that did not work.

All of the research I have done (and, since I started today, it has not been all that much) seems to refer to starting darktable from the command line interface, not from the GUI, and perhaps that is why nothing I have tried has worked. I am, at this point, out of ideas.

4

It is covered here: https://www.darktable.org/usermanual/en/lua_chapter.html#lua_basic_principles

5

Yes, the user manual.

I have a copy of that on my system and was following the instructions, but nothing worked. For example, the manual says, in the “A simple lua example” section

Let’s start with a simple example. We will print some code on the console. Create a file called luarc in darktable’s configuration directory (usually ~/.config/darktable/) and add the following line to it

The script they provide is for printing “Hello, world”, the standard first program for new users. But that prints to the console, and hence my understanding that this is all console related, and not used for the GUI darktable.app application on the Mac. Similarly the user manual specifies setting startup options for darktable, but again that is for the console operation, not the GUI app.

Trying to use the same information (this is where I got the luarc name) with the app does not seem to work. I assume there has to be a specific startup option, and that can only be done either by using the console or starting the console app with a script. Perhaps that is what I need to do, but then why provide the GUI app? Any why not specify in the manual that it only applies to the console commands?

I am confused as to how to apply the console instructions to the GUI, but that at least has the comfort of not being a new feeling. :grinning:

6

The hello world script in the luarc will print “Hello World” in a pop up bubble when the GUI darktable first starts. The message comes and goes quickly, so its easy to miss. I’d imagine I’d echo at the CLI as well.

If you can see the hello world at the CLI, then open the GUI and look towards the bottom of the application window right as the GUI starts.

7

About the display fonts, I had a similar issue on my 1920x1080 display (small Lenovo Thinkpad X260 12.5"). What you need to do is edit the darktablerc prefs file (on Linux is located under ~/.config/darktable/, not sure on Mac but surely the docs will help) and play with these parameters:

screen_dpi_overwrite=120.0
bauhaus/scale=3.4
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