MTPaint
Version: 3.50 Web: https://github.com/wjaguar
We have another addition to your collection of extremely lightweight productivity applications. Last time (see LXF223) we admired the great AzPainter drawing program, and in case you found its interface too entangling, here is a simpler candidate. Meet MTPaint, a personal graphic editor written by Mark Tyler back in the days of GTK 1 and initially optimised for decent performance on machines that are a hundred times feebler than your smartphone of today.
We’re not talking about ancient abandonware, though. MTPaint has been continuously developed up to version 3.40 (released in 2011), but since then only few development versions were released. The current MTPaint 3.50 release of nowadays brings an impressive number of enhancements and new features, and, by the way, it can be safely compiled against GTK2. So you can now enjoy scripting console (Image > Script), support for multiple threads when rendering images (good for multicore CPUs), optional gamma correction for painting, much better text tools, multiple clone tool improvements, a new file format (PMM) and a whole lot more. In the meantime, MTPaint is still a classic graphic application optimised for manual drawing and working with indexed palettes. It requires as little resources as, say, MicrosoftPaint from early Windows versions, but in return gives you more advanced tools. MTPaint supports layers, transparency, selections, up to 1,000 undo steps and up to 8000% for (spying our pay rises– Ed) zooming in. And even that is not the end of MTPaint’s feature-list: how about exporting your artwork to ASCII or turning a multi-layered file into a GIF animation with a few mouse clicks? Alternatively, you can set your own custom keyboard shortcuts for any menu item of the editor, and become a keyboard ninja of bitmaps.
For many common tasks MTPaint is able to replace GIMP as the main creative tool, so why not give this mighty little editor a try?
“For many common tasks MTPaint is able to replace GIMP”