My workflow has been to peruse raws with geeqie and then to spawn Rawtherapee, tweak the raw and then to send the resulting tif to Gimp for final touches. With RawTherapee I can adjust the same raw image N-times and then send N-tifs off to Gimp, where I get to choose the one I like best, or perhaps to mask parts of one and blend it onto another.
After editing .config/geeqie/applications/appimagekit-gimp.desktop so the mime types definition includes image/x-nikon-nef I can now spawn Gimp directly from geeqie, on a raw image. Gimp then spawns Darktable. So far so good.
But the only way I can find to get back to Gimp, from DarkTable, is to kill the Darktable window. Which makes it impossible to send 2, 3 or 4 versions of the same raw to Gimp (from Darktable), as I can do with RawTherapee. I could manually export N-versions to ./darktable_exported and then manually open Gimp and manually navigate to that directory and then click the mouse a few times. Automatic export of multiple image versions, directly to Gimp, would be nice if it was possible.
Am I missing something? Or are manual exports and manual gimp loading my only Darktable option?