Rectangle Select Tool downgrade?

VCD · **Joined:** Oct 05, 2013 **Posts:** 1

I finally upgraded to 2.8 after using 2.6 for a long while.
In 2.6, the rectangle select tool, which I work heavily with, had somewhat transparent thin lines and even had a "smart" color change(?) when you were cropping into the image making it extremely useful and absolutely precise. The other cropping tools operated similar.

2.8 seems to have replaced the transparent with solid, thicker white lines and abandoned the color-change feature, making precision crops more inconvenient. The crawling ants are no help. Again, the other cropping tools now have this 2.8 "up"grade, so alternatives are not an answer to this problem.

Are there options for making the rectangle select tool like it was with 2.6? Or maybe there's a different method to using the tool I'm unaware of which makes it superior to 2.6's? While I am impressed with 2.8 so far, this seems to be an absolute step backwards.

Erisian · **Posted:** Sat Oct 05, 2013 6:35 am **(#2)**

Sounds like yet another reason for me to not upgrade my Gimp. What do you make of those wretched tool sliders VCD? I'll keep my opinions on gimmicky v. practical to myself as I tend to annoy people when I speak them!

Welcome to Gimp Chat.

ofnuts · **Joined:** Oct 25, 2010 **Posts:** 4812

VCD wrote:

I finally upgraded to 2.8 after using 2.6 for a long while.
In 2.6, the rectangle select tool, which I work heavily with, had somewhat transparent thin lines and even had a "smart" color change(?) when you were cropping into the image making it extremely useful and absolutely precise. The other cropping tools operated similar.

2.8 seems to have replaced the transparent with solid, thicker white lines and abandoned the color-change feature, making precision crops more inconvenient. The crawling ants are no help. Again, the other cropping tools now have this 2.8 "up"grade, so alternatives are not an answer to this problem.

Are there options for making the rectangle select tool like it was with 2.6? Or maybe there's a different method to using the tool I'm unaware of which makes it superior to 2.6's? While I am impressed with 2.8 so far, this seems to be an absolute step backwards.

It looks different because these indicator lines are now rendered using the Cairo graphics library. The new ones look less accurate on the rectangle selection but make a lot more sense when lines are not straight horizontals or verticals (Ellipse/Freehand selection, Paths) because the thin indicator lines you love so much were not anti-aliased. And the line width doesn't increase when you zoom in, so it can always be thinner that the accuracy you require.

Besides, these lines were not that smart in 2.6 because they were drawn using XOR (the "smart color change"), so two overlapping lines cancel each other (a real plague when working with paths).