On Tue, 12 Feb 2013, Paul A. Rubin wrote:
I'm not a fan of GIMP, and I do prefer to use other tools.
Paul, My bit-mapped graphic needs are minimal so I've used The GIMP since 1997 and it does well by me.
There's one catch with changing the default, though: I suspect that GIMP is as close as you get to an editor you can expect to be present. It's certainly not standard on Windows, and I'm not sure about Mac OS, but I think most Linux distros come with GIMP. I'm not sure there is any other choice for default editor that is likely to be installed on a significant proportion of user machines.
There's actually a simple resolution to this, but while it's common for us linux/*BSD users it's probably not common for users of other OSes. Use whatever tool you want separate from LyX. You can use Imagemagick, for example, then save the file in a bit-mapped format (.png, .jpg) and insert into the LyX document. Most of my figures and plots are vector-based and generated with R and PSTricks. I never work on a figure within LyX. Rich
