GIMP reconfigured to legacy style

In windows days the tool of choice for sizing and croping images was PaintShopPro, which was a chargable package until version 5 was relased as a free download on one of the magazines, but it always had a few quirks which made it less than the ideal tool. GIMP addressed such things as being able to drag the crop box to fine tune it's position and other handy short cuts, but it suffered from an iritating change to the user interface where one could no longer simply open an image and save the edited version. The save defaulted to safing all of the GIMP workspace activity relating to the image and one had to remember to 'export' rather than 'save'. An action that is out of sink with all other tools for other file formats. However since the control interface is a writen in Python one can at least reconfigure some of these elements and get back to a more familiar style of working.

shallowsky plugins in particular gimp-save restores the save and save-as functions and it is possible to hide the additional menu items by following gimp-developer-list/2015-May/msg00113

You need to edit /usr/share/gimp/2.0/menus and comment out a few lines so that it becomes:
&lt;separator/&gt;
  &lt;placeholder name=&quot;Save&quot;&gt;
    &lt;!--&lt;menuitem action=&quot;file-save&quot;/&gt;
    &lt;menuitem action=&quot;file-save-as&quot;/&gt;
    &lt;menuitem action=&quot;file-save-a-copy&quot;/&gt;--&gt;
  &lt;/placeholder&gt;
  &lt;menuitem action=&quot;file-revert&quot;/&gt;
  &lt;separator/&gt;
 &lt;!-- &lt;placeholder name=&quot;Export&quot;&gt;
    &lt;menuitem action=&quot;file-export-to&quot;/&gt;
    &lt;menuitem action=&quot;file-overwrite&quot;/&gt;
    &lt;menuitem action=&quot;file-export&quot;/&gt;
  &lt;/placeholder&gt;--&gt;
  &lt;menuitem action=&quot;file-create-template&quot;/&gt;

Some of the elements of the menu are added automatically when a plug-in is installed, but it was possible to edit the auto-register element of the gimp-save function to provide a more familiar set of names and order.

(Need to document just what had been done to get GIMP to the style required)