# The Toolbox

Screenshot of the Toolbox

The Toolbox is the heart of GIMP. Here is a quick tour of what you will find there.

In the Toolbox, as in most parts of GIMP, moving the mouse over something and letting it rest for a moment, usually displays a tooltip that describes the thing. Short cut keys are also frequently shown in the tooltip. In many cases, you can hover the mouse over an item and press the F1 key to get help about the thing that is underneath the mouse.

By default, only the Foreground/Background Colors area is visible. You can add the Brush/Pattern/Gradient area and Active Image area through Edit Preferences Toolbox : .

1. Tool icons: These icons are buttons which activate tools for a wide variety of purposes: selecting parts of images, painting an image, transforming an image, etc. gives an overview of how to work with tools, and each tool is described systematically in the Tools chapter.

   Since GIMP-2.10.18, these icons can be tools groups. See .

2. Foreground/Background colors:

   The color area shows GIMP's current foreground and background colors, which are used for painting, filling, and many other operations. Clicking on either one of them brings up a color selector dialog that allows you to change to a different color.

   Clicking on the small symbol in the lower left corner resets the foreground and background colors to black and white. Pressing the D key has the same effect.

   Clicking on the double-headed arrow symbol swaps the foreground and background colors. Pressing the X key has the same effect.

3. Brush/Pattern/Gradient: The symbols here show you GIMP's current selections for: the Paintbrush, used by all tools that allow you to paint on the image (painting includes operations like erasing and smudging, by the way); for the Pattern, which is used in filling selected areas of an image; and for the Gradient, which comes into play whenever an operation requires a smoothly varying range of colors. Clicking on any of these symbols brings up a dialog window that allows you to change it.

4. Active Image: In GIMP, you can work with many images at once, but at any given moment, only one image is the active image. Here you find a small iconic representation of the active image. Click the icon to display a dialog with a list of the currently open images, click an image in the dialog to make it active. Usually, you click an image window in multi-window mode, or an image tab in single-window mode, to make it the active image.

   If you use GIMP on a Unix-like operating system with the X Window System, you can also drag and drop the thumbnail to an enabled XDS file manager to directly save the corresponding image.

   XDS

At every start, GIMP selects the brush, color, pattern you used when quitting your previous session because the Save input device settings on exit in Preferences/Input Devices, is checked by default. If you uncheck it, GIMP will use a color, a brush and a pattern by default, always the same.

The Toolbox window displays Wilber's eyes along the top of the dialog. You can click-drag-and-drop an image from a file browser into this area to open it. You can get rid of this logo by unchecking the Show GIMP logo option in the Toolbox Preferences.

Toolbox Introduction