Add a button to make selection tools select the area specified in their options
Submitted by John S Hobart
Link to original bug (#756821)
Description
There are times when the user might want to use the value listed in options panel of a selection tool, but there is currently no way to update the selection to match the current values in the tool options panel.
Example 1: If you are selecting many different rectangles in an image moving the selection box has many unexpected steps.
Steps to reproduce:
- Make a selections using one of the selection tools, such as rectangle select
- Manually change position and/or size in the tool options
- Try to copy the shown selection (ctrl+c) and paste it to a new image (ctrl+shift+v). Note that the clipboard doesn't actually contain the area you supposedly selected in step 2.
- If necessary (depending on what was previously in your clipboard), go back to the original image you were working with, then click the selection rectangle so that the selection is updated and re-try step 3.
- Go back to the original image and manually change position and/or size in the tool options to selection a different area. Note that nothing happens.
- Click the selection area so the adjustment controls re-appear (they disappeared in step 4)
- Re-type the position and size changes from step 5
- Repeat from step 3
Note the extra mouse movements and clicking that would be required for selecting multiple rectangles, as well as the multiple gotchas from the selection box being in odd states (either not actually selected or being un-adjustable). A user might learn not to fall for the gotchas but doing so would still extra clicking and/or mouse movement.
Example 2: If you have multiple images which you want to grab the same region from there are several extra steps because you cannot easily re-use the values in the tool options.
Alternate steps to reproduce:
- Make a selection using the rectangle select tool and note the values in the tool options.
- Open a different file or make a new one. Note that the tool options panel still contains the values from step 1.
- Click or drag with the rectangle select tool to make an arbitrary rectangle.
- Enter the values from step 1
- Click the selection rectangle twice so that the selection updates and then is adjustable. (as shown to be needed in step 3 and 4 of the first example)
- Repeat from step 2.