GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 167809
image window/move tool focus
Last modified: 2005-02-18 21:44:33 UTC
Distribution/Version: debian unstable Once the focus is gained by the image window widgets at the lower portion of the image window, meaning the radio menus that change the units or the zoom percentage, they never give it up. This disables the ability to move things within the window (selections, layers or paths) one pixel at a time with the arrow keys. Removing the menurc and restarting gimp is one way to fix it. Another easier way to fix it is to close and reopen the image. This problem exists with cvs gimp and not with the stable gimp.
As with all other GTK+ widgets you can move the keyboard focus out of these widgets using the Tab key. This is not a bug. These widgets must be keyboard accessible just like all other widgets in GIMP.
The behaviour in GIMP 2.2 is exactly the same, btw.
The real problem is that it is easy to get into a state where there is no indication which element has the focus. Initially, there is e.g. a dotted frame in the dopdown that is active, but it vanishes as soon as a selection is created. Then the cursor keys seem to be dead - unless you use up and down, nothing changes. This might be theme related (I'm using 2.2.3 with the themer formerly known as gtk-wimp), but as it can be seen it happens on other platforms as well.
Hm, we used to have the policy that in the image window, no widget except the canvas should ever get the focus. We Explicitely disable CAN_FOCUS for stuff like the menu button and the scrollbars and should do the same for all other widgets.
With the arrow keys only working to change the focus between those two menus seems very useless. The tab key works. It just seems like a lot of mess without much benefit. I tend to agree with comment #4 since there are so many ways to change the zoom ratio and very few times you actually need to change the units. As it stands, it is very confusing and frustrating. Especially the way the arrow keys move the focus in such a limited way.
I already had a different fix prepared for this, but probably Mitch is right and we should unset CAN_FOCUS on the combo boxes.
Applied to both branches: 2005-02-18 Sven Neumann <sven@gimp.org> * app/display/gimpstatusbar.c: unset the CAN_FOCUS flag on the combo boxes and the cancel button. Set "focus-on-click" to FALSE for the combo boxes. Fixes bug #167809.