Re: tool selector

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Mon, 18 Aug 2003, Fulko van Westrenen wrote:

> Date: Mon, 18 Aug 2003 09:06:49 +0200
> From: Fulko van Westrenen <fwes@lina.dto.tudelft.nl>
> Reply-To: dia-list@gnome.org
> To: dia-list@gnome.org
> Subject: tool selector
>
> Dear Dia-developers,
>
> I use Dia for a few years now and found it to be very usefull. The technical
> documents I write often need some schemas to support my text, and dia is
> my friend here. Thank you for your work.
>
> There is one point I would like to discuss. All drawing tools for MS-Windows
> have a design flaw in my opinion: when you select a drawing tool and draw an
> element, the tool resets to the selector after drawing. So if you want to
> draw twelve boxes, you must select the box-tool twelve times. Dia has the
> same behaviour. I think this is a serious mistake; it is a mouse-arm generating
> feature. Please change it, or make it a switch.
>
> At the moment I use v0.88. If you already changed this, please ignore my
> comment. My appreciation remains.

Version 0.88 is hideously broken if you try and set any of the tools using
the menu items in the Tools menu.  (Easily the most frequent bug reported
against Dia).
If you were not using 0.88 you would be able to assign keybindings to
these menu items and quicly and easily switch between these tools using
only a few keystrokes.

You can disable reset tool after create in the preferences dialog, i think
you might even have been able to do so in 0.88 but please for the love of
all that is good in this Universe please upgrade.

I'm not sure if it has been done yet but Krystov* had a patch that
would allow you to shift+click which would make just that tool stick or
not reset until you choose another one.

I didn't know about the spacebar trick, nice one Cyrille.
Is that documented anywhere?

Sincerely

Alan Horkan
http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/


* apologies if i spelt that wrong