How To Add Dialog Tabs to GIMP if you Accidentally Closed Them All
Early on, I screwed up. By default, when you open GIMP 2.4, in the interface, right below the "toolbox", displays two tabs. Each tab displays the configuration settings for a particular tool in the toolbox. For example, if you select the paintbrush tool, you'll see a representation of the paintbrush on one of the tabs. If you select the tab (assuming it isn't already selected, you'll see the configuration setting controls for the toolbrush, such as Mode, Opacity, Brush size, and so on.
To the very right of the tab area, you'll see a left pointing arrow. If you click on that arrow, you'll see a menu with selection items including one that says Close Tab. If you click that selection, the open tab will close. Since there are only two tabs available by default, if you repeat the process, you'll close both tabs and the area that should display tool configuration settings will vanish. If you select a new tool in the toolbox, the configuration settings won't appear and you'll be without any way to change the settings for that tool.
That said, if you do close all of the tabs, all is not lost. In fact, that's the point of this small tutorial; getting the tabs back. I learned this tasks out of necessity after having clicked the left-pointing arrow out of curiosity and discovering the results. Here's what I did.
NOTE: There's more than one way to add a tab in GIMP. See the tutorial How To Add Tabs in GIMP to see how.
- On the GIMP interface, click File and then click Dialogs
- Select any one of the desired dialogs to open it.
- Drag the dialog into the blank area just below the toolbox to anchor it there and create a tab.
- Repeat this process with another tool dialog.
You can then add more tabs as needed and close them at will. You can also change the order that tabs appear by dragging them.