Hi, Juhana Sadeharju <kouhia@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > Here is an alternative rectangle selection tool: > (1) by pressing the left mouse button, user may drag the (initial) > rectangle, > (2) when pointer is moved on the selection edges and corners, > user may grab and drag the edge or the corner, > (3) selection gets deleted if user pressed mouse button when the > pointer is not on the edges or the corners. > > That is all what can be done with the tool. There is no possibility to > enlarge the selection the way the current rectangle selection can be > enlarged. The point is that you misunderstood what a selection is. A selection is a mask holding a selection value between 0 and 255 for each pixel in the image. What you see on the GIMP canvas is just the selection border, a line draw along the pixels that are 50% selected. Now if you create a rectangular selection, you alter the selection mask so that it looks like a rectangle. The information about the corner points of the rectangle is not stored anywhere. That's why you cannot edit the selection the way you suggested. I am not saying that our selection tools couldn't behave differently, but I am saying that it would require a major redesign of how GIMP treats selections. The vectors tool was designed in a way that allows it to work on other shapes than only bezier curves. We might want to base a new rectangles tool on this architecture and perhaps it would even make sense to make this the default rect-select tool. > The rectangle could be deleted only by clicking outside the > rectangle, and the whole rectangle could be moved by grabbing inside > the rectangle. When the selection is moved this way, only the > selection info is changed and no image data is moved around (as > happens with the current selection tools). ... unless you press the Alt key. > I took the latest CVS version. If it compiles, we could only check > how to get me started for coding these tools. Well, a good start would be to make yourself familiar with such basic concepts of image editing as selection masks. This is an important feature that we cannot live without. A good way to understand selections is to play with the QuickMask feature. It illustrates selections quite well. Sven
