Can Gimp Draw Arrows (brushes don't work)?

[dbareis]

I'm a simple user of image editors, unfortunately it appears you have to be a professional editor to even attempt to use Gimp.

What I do is crop, resize, draw text, draw arrows from a to b (text to subject of text).  Everyone seem to recommend brushes, but from my attempts that is not possible, for starters you don't define 'a' & 'b" and can't change the length.  All of this is relatively trivial in Paint.Net and some other editors, I just thought I'd try GIMP out.  I have looked for and failed to find much in the way of tutorials on any of the basics.

Am I missing something? Or is it not possible to draw arrows (a modified straight line with arrow head) in GIMP?

[rich2005]

(04-07-2025, 06:52 AM)dbareis Wrote: ....snip...
What I do is crop, resize, draw text, draw arrows from a to b (text to subject of text).  Everyone seem to recommend brushes, but from my attempts that is not possible, for starters you don't define 'a' & 'b" and can't change the length
.....snip....
Am I missing something? Or is it not possible to draw arrows (a modified straight line with arrow head) in GIMP?

There is a Gimp script that uses a path to define the position of an arrow.

A very long thread but the script is here: https://www.gimp-forum.net/Thread-Arrow-...9#pid12419

Download the zip, unzip and there are two files, use the arrow_v3.scm for Gimp 3.0 
That goes in your User profile scripts folder  C:\Users\"yourname"\AppData\Roaming\GIMP\3.0\scripts
Registers in the Tools menu  Looks like this.

   

Edit: If you are anotating text then you might want to keep all the arrows in their own layer. Once the arrow parameters are set (there is a Save / Load ) an arrow will repeat using Filters -> Repeat Last (ctrl-F)
A 60 second animation https://i.imgur.com/eHAxwMR.mp4

[denzjos]

rich, thanks for the link. 

[Ofnuts]

(04-07-2025, 06:52 AM)dbareis Wrote: I'm a simple user of image editors, unfortunately it appears you have to be a professional editor to even attempt to use Gimp.

What I do is crop, resize, draw text, draw arrows from a to b (text to subject of text).  Everyone seem to recommend brushes, but from my attempts that is not possible, for starters you don't define 'a' & 'b" and can't change the length.  All of this is relatively trivial in Paint.Net and some other editors, I just thought I'd try GIMP out.  I have looked for and failed to find much in the way of tutorials on any of the basics.

Am I missing something? Or is it not possible to draw arrows (a modified straight line with arrow head) in GIMP?

For this kind of graphics there are much simpler apps. See LibreOffice Draw for instance.

[dbareis]

Thanks for the replies, while my main needs are simple, I would like to learn how to do more complex editing, so yes GIMP is overkill and complicated to use even for simple things (which I assume the devs have forgotten how to do), but I am happy if I can learn more as I go.  

There is not enough help in the app to even get help working (at least the offline version) which is frustrating.  I also can't believe that there is no plugin, brush or and other repository and in app management, sounds to me like the basics have been ignored in the app.

Anyway the script works and while more complicated than in other apps I can see that you can draw more complicated arrows which is great.  I assume I can add a hotkey to it to speed things up, I will try later on.

The "repeat arrows" (under filter) tip is a great one, thanks.

I don't know why posts and the documentation is full of paths such as "C:\Users\"yourname"\AppData\Roaming\GIMP\3.0\scripts" which need explanation (and in fact may be somewhere other than this default location) rather than just specifying "%appdata%\GIMP\3.0\scripts" which needs none...