Can I pin GIMP panels?

QI’ve just starting use the GIMP image-editing tool. It’s very powerful but the behaviour of the various control panels annoys me. Because they’re not attached to the main editing window they sometimes obscure the image I’m working on, or disappear partly or wholly behind some other window. Why is GIMP designed like this? It seems very messy. My other programs keep everything in one tidy window. Is there any way to ‘pin’ the various panels together so that they move with the editing window?

AGIMP calls these ‘floating’ panels Dockable Dialogs and while they’re loved by some, others loathe the way they work. Dockable Dialogs make most sense to professional designers and illustrators, who will typically use very large displays, or even multi-screen setups — as they need to keep lots of different tool types accessible. Different Dockable Dialogs can be joined together, allowing professionals to tailor the tools to work just the way they want.

So that’s the why, but clearly this style doesn’t work for you. The simplest fix is to open the Windows menu in GIMP and then click to tick Single-window Mode (see screenshot). Right away, any Dockable Dialogs that you have open will be anchored to the left- and right-hand sides of the editing window — so everything now moves as one.

You still might want to tailor the Dockable Dialogs, and this is easily done. To add a new one, open the Windows menu, point to Dockable Dialogs and then click the one you want. To move one, just click, drag and drop its tab to a new position. To remove one, click, drag and drop its tab out of the docking area, then click the floating panel’s red cross.