GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 72896
Bucket fill should behave differently with selections
Last modified: 2002-10-04 15:33:37 UTC
Bucket fill normally grabs the color under the cursor and starts filling outwards based on that. When you have a selection, however, it behaves differently: it just fills the whole thing, as if you had pressed ctrl-. (but with the foreground color). What it should do is fill as usual, but treat the selection edges as hard boundaries that it does not extend beyond. Example scenario: 1. Create a box of some color different from the background. 2. Use the ellipitcal select to choose an area centering on the upper righthand corner of the box. If you were to press ctrl-X at this point there would be a circular scoop carved out of the box. 3. Select bucket fill and a color different from the background and the box. Click on a pixel that is inside the selection as well as on top of the box. 4. You should get the upper righthand corner of the box filled with that color, and nothing else. Instead the entire ellipse fills.
That would be a rather harsh change since it always used to work the way it does. How would you completely fill a selection then? You can achieve what you describe by combining the ellipse select tool with the by-color-select tool. However it might be worse to think about implementing the proposed behaviour as an option since it would save the user a few operations and could indeed often be useful.
If you want to fill a selection, it is far easier to just press ctrl-period. (If you want to use the foreground color, type "x", ctrl-period, then "x" again.) It doesn't make sense to me that there is a tool that behaves in two wildly different ways, depending on whether you have a selection or not. The select-by-color isn't a reasonable option. It's actually my girlfriend who needs this feature: she does something called "flatting" for a comic book production house, which is basically just filling in areas with color underneath what has already been drawn. She has been searching for an alternate method of achieving this same goal at the speed she needs to work (which involves doing this operation several thousand times per page) and hasn't come up with anything, including select-by-color.
After some discussion on IRC we decided we want to change the behaviour as you suggested. If set the target milestone to 1.3.x so we don't forget to do so.
Awesome! Did I mention you guys rock? :)
Attached a small patch to change this behaviour. I've probably ignored the style rules & missed obvious object clean-up, but it seems to work OK for me. Cheers, Dave.
Created attachment 10891 [details] [review] Patch to change the behaviour of the bucket fill tool when there is an active selection
Looks fine on first sight, but I haven't tried the patch yet.
In that case, I'll commit & suffer wrath later :) Could someone change the status? I don't have permission to do so... Dave.
Setting this bug to RESOLVED FIXED. Sorry for not doing that earlier... I was busy with my own wedding. ;-)