GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 505758
Selection (marching ants) not shown on image
Last modified: 2009-06-07 23:44:08 UTC
Please describe the problem: To get any idea of what the selection is at the moment the selection editor needs to be open constantly and this is a small window. Previously the Selection showed a dotted line on the image itself signifying what the selection was thus making it easy to figure out how things were adding up... Without this active things seem to be problematic as far as a comprehensible and easy to follow workflow. I assume it was a bug because this problem didnt exist till recently. Steps to reproduce: 1. Try to make a selection 2. After trying to make a selection look around to see if you can see the lines for selection without opening selection editor Actual results: No Selection lines appear on the image itself and only way to tell what the selection is in the selection editor (which again is quite small to tell) Expected results: I would expect to see a selection line where the selection is (running dotted lines) much like the older behavior to signify what is actually selected so you can see it well Does this happen every time? Yes Other information: This is a major hassle for me as I use Gimp all the time for things and use the selection tool quite alot as im sure alot of other people do...
It would appear the View > Show Selection Is the Culprit even though it is active its not showing the actual selection
Seems to work fine for everyone else so this is more likely a problem with your system or setup. Is there anything you can tell us about your system?
AMD Sempron 2400+ (1.72 ghz) 2 Gigs of Ram and Windows XP with a Geforce 6800+ This didnt happen with previous versions to me at all so thats where im kind of lost.... I can try a fresh install of Gimp all together but other then that the Show selection thing isnt working with showing a select when you make it for me. Its unclear why as i havent changed anything at all since it was working....
Upon Opening and closing it again its now working but it wasnt when i filed the bug report and i had tried opening it a few times to be sure.... not entirely sure what happened there....
Could be a problem with the GTK+ windows port not reporting the window visibility correctly. In order to save power, GIMP doesn't show the animated selection outline when the window is not visible.
I vaguely rememeber this to be a problem with some tools which do change how input works on windows, especially non-focussed ones.
Not entirely sure the windows were in focus as i was clicking the fuzzy selection tool.... As i said after i shut down GIMP and reopened it all was clearer but... No idea why it happened in the first place but it seems better now so i have no idea. Quite confusing to me but i just wanted to make sure it was documented that it did happen once.
I can confirm this. It's an intermitent problem, so it's quite hard to track. It happens when working on large images, apparently when switching selection tools or undoing a selection. I couldn't find a reliable way to reproduce it yet. The selection exists indeed (it's possible to check it using the selection editor), but the marching ants disappear and don't come back until you restart the application. When you close and re-open gimp the selection with the marching ants are there. I'll try to provide more information as soon as I get it. Anyway, I'd say to change the state to confirmed. I have three different computers (all running Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon but the problem was there with Feisty Fawn which had a different GTK version). I can confirm the problem since 2.4 RC (although iirc 2.3.x had that problem too).
So someone else has seen the problem then and yeah it must be intermittent as i havent seen it since i reported this issue... I haven't seen it happen to me in Linux but on Windows it has...
We still need a way to reliably reproduce the problem.
Created attachment 102462 [details] [review] patch that might have an impact on the described issue Here's a patch you might want to try. It changes the selection code to draw the selection even if the window is flagged as being invisible. In that case, the animation is not started, but the selection is nevertheless drawn once. My guess is that the window visibility state is incorrectly propagated to GIMP. If this is correct, then this patch should make the selection visible for you but you will see a static selection outline instead of the marching ants.
If you guys want to see any progress on this issue, then please test this patch and provide feedback...
Sven: I'd like to test the patch but I have two problems right now. An internet connection working at 2 KB/s and not to mention my lack of experience compiling and using patches. I'll try the patch as soon as I recover a decent state in my connection. Doing further tests I discovered that this problem with the selection is more likely to appear when using a tablet. I guess some feedback from the tablet driver sends a wrong window status in certain moment, so maybe that's what is causing mostly the problem. Is Lina using a tablet too? I don't know if that information can be useful, and in that case, I'd like to know if this is an upstream bug and should be reported (where) or can be solved using this patch.
Patch works for me as described to me.... Appreciate the help with it :) Im not sure why the window would of been showing as invisible though ....
OK, I have committed this to both branches now: 2008-01-23 Sven Neumann <sven@gimp.org> * app/display/gimpdisplayshell-selection.c: show the selection, even if the window is flagged as invisible, but don't start the animation. Addresses bug #505758. Lowering severity to minor.
*** Bug 499603 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Since the workaround seems to help and the actual problem is most likely in GDK, this doesn't need to be on the 2.4 milestone any longer.
Ok well :) thats good to know :)
Sven, why is this bug still open? Doesn't look like a gimp problem to me.
I think it can be closed now. I never saw this problem again in 2.6.x
Thanks, let's get rid of it then :)