I am not quite sure how a popup window would be useful when making selections. It occurs to me that such a window would rather get in the way than being useful.

This bug report needs more information for being useful. Perhaps the best thing is to bring this up on the gimp-developer mailing-list. We can then discuss it and put the results of the discussion back here.

IIRC we had either a bug or a discussion about opening new views at the cursor position some time ago.

I agree that a pop-up window would not be the best option, but I was assuming it might be the simplest to implement and there are magnifier add-ons available for Windows that work this way.  The best way, IMO, would be to have a simulated "lens" that moves with your cursor and allows you to see an enlarged view for a given radius around the current cursor position.  Allowing it to be toggled on/off by some key combination would be ideal since it would enable the user to get it out of the way when it is not needed.

I was serious about moving this discussion to the developer list. This enhancement request isn't helpful with a more detailed description of use cases and how this should work in detail.

If you want to move it, that's fine.  I wish I could give you a more detailed description, but it just seems so obvious to me that I don't know where to start.  I'll try again, though.

Let's say you're creating a path for a selection.  The image often will have areas that are easy to select and difficult to select, based on the local contrast.  If you could work on most of the area while zoomed out to a reasonable level, then simply by pressing a key or two (such as SHIFT+Z) a circular, virtual lens appears, centered on your cursor, that would enable you to quickly zoom in to make a better selection.

Another example would be working on details that are scattered around the image.  Say you want to add some catch lights to a person's eyes.  You could have the window zoomed in to show both eyes at the same time.  Then you could enable the lens which would allow you to zoom in on each eye while you place the catch lights.  This would allow you to easily compare size, shape, and position of the lights without having to pan back and forth, zoom in and out, etc.

I hope this helps clarify things.  Thanks for considering it.

Seriously, I am asking you to bring this up on the gimp-developer mailing-list so that we can discuss it there. Now please stop adding comments to this bug report until that has happened. We don't want to discuss new features in the bug-tracker, that's the wrong place for it.

The information missing here is how the current tool should interact with the magnifying glass. This needs careful consideration and should be discussed on the list. If we decide that such a feature fits into the vision we have for GIMP, then we can reopen this bug report with a full specification.
 

Sven,

Look, every time I submit a bug it seems to pi$$ you off.  I'm just trying to contribute however I can.

I thought you meant that "you" were going to move it to the developer's mailing list.  I would love to do it, and I will if you tell me where to find that list I will do it promptly.  When I submit a bug, I start at the GIMP.org homepage and go from there.

As for your comment "We don't want to discuss new features in the bug-tracker, that's the wrong place to do it.", I'm confused .....  I marked this submission as an "enhancement".  Isn't this tool setup to discuss enhancements?

Again, I'm sorry if I seem ignorant to you.  But I'm not a programmer, I'm just a GIMP user who appreciates what all of you are doing and who would like to contribute in whatever way I can.  If I can figure out where the developer mailing list is, I'll bring this topic up.  But if you don't see it show up over there in the next day or so, please take a minute to add this info for me.

Thanks ..... Mark

I am not pissed off. There are just too many enhancement requests in our bug-tracker that lack a important information and discussion. A bug tracker should track only things that we really want to implement and preferably it should contain a detailed description of how the proposed feature. We can't have the necessary discussions here, simply because not enough people participate in it.

http://gimp.org/mail_lists.html

OK, after a fruitful round of discussion on the developer list, this bug now morphs into a placeholder for the pop-up loupe feature.

The pop-up loupe, has the potential to be a transformational feature. It has the potential (when properly
designed) to fully transform the way most people work with GIMP in work-macroscopic/change-microscopic situations, that goes way beyond setting selections pixel-precise.

The pop-up loupe is meant to be used combination with any odd toolbox tool, press a certain keyboard key and the loupe pops up for adjusting microscopic things, release the key and it is gone.

The guiding principle is that the enlarged view is both very lose and out of the way of the mouse pointer, similar to the way that is shown in this image:

http://www.creativepro.com/img/story/20051219_fg5.jpg

The temporary loupe shall have its own zoom level and also have an option to work absolute (to the image data) or relative (to the zoom level in the actual image window). This means you can set it to display the image data at 400%, or 400% of the window level (window is at 33%, result in the loupe is 132%).
And all this of course not far away in the preferences, but preferably in a HUD (heads-up display) when the loupe is there.

The dark edges of the loupe shall be semi-transparant to get the best balance between function (tying the mouse pointer and loupe view together) and obstruction. This requires cairo.

The mouse pointer shall also be displayed in the loupe view, enlarged for the paint tools.
The speed at which the mouse pointer traverses pixels because of mouse movements shall be the natural speed of the loupe view, to afford working microscopically.

I have added a new bug-report for this (bug #421211). This one already had too many off-topic comments.