In layers palette, click on the white area and then anywhere on the palette. Type any letter. A little text box pops up and displays it for some seconds, then it dessapears. What you typed went nowhere -apparently-. What is it for?

(just bothering me every time I choose a tool by its shortcut)

Newbie forever

Hi Marcelo,
Lol, that has annoyed me for quite a while, but it hasn't occurred to me to ask what it is! I just played around with it, and for me, all I have to do is click anywhere in the Layers dialog, then type any key, and up it pops. Do nothing more, and after a couple of seconds, it disappears. I tried hitting enter, thinking maybe it would create a new layer. But no, it just disappears. I like to use the Q key zoom shortcut, and just ALWAYS end up typing q's in that darned little box. But for me, if I click in the canvas first, it seems to deactivate the box. The image I'm working right now requires a LOT of tricky selecting, deselecting and reselecting, requiring layers to be hidden and unhidden, so it's aggravating

I know that layers are really specialized Groups, so maybe it's like a way for naming a group??? Nah, that doesn't make sense I've even read the tavmjong Guide, which doesn't mention it. So I'm stumped. I'm thinking "bug"!

Edit -- I'm using Inkscape 0.48 on Windows 7, 64-bit.

brynn wrote:

Marcelo wrote:In layers palette, click on the white area and then anywhere on the palette. Type any letter. A little text box pops up and displays it for some seconds, then it dessapears.

(…) I'm thinking "bug"!

Bug #505225 in Inkscape: “Layer text box popup” [1]

[1] focus issue affects all docked dialogs -> bug #201203

Well, you know It's maybe expected to have productive reasons to ask questions, not just "just-to-know" ones... and that's why I took couple of years to do it + some ridiculous searching first. How would you google this, eh?

Thanks brynn.

thanks -suv. No more doubts.

How would you google this, eh?

Ah, well I was actually googling Launchpad, when I saw ~suv's response. I believe ~suv must have all of Launchpad memorized, lol! Not that that's a bad thing, not at all!

Thanks ~suv

You know, I think this is a very unique bug at least from my non-technical perspective. Because I would think you'd have to write a bunch of extra code to get that little box to pop up. It just seems like omitting code would be the usual way a bug is created.....or wrongly written code, so that you'd have a malfunctioning feature. But extra code that creates an entirely unexpected feature -- I think that might be hard to do?! I'm not criticizing the developers, NO, don't get me wrong here. It just strikes me as a little goofy!

We live. We learn. We laugh.

Isn't it a search box? It doesn't seem work for some reason though, but I think it's a built-in GTK-search-thing because it looks like the one that shows up when you type something in Nautilus (file manager in Ubuntu) and in lists in general. I'm on a windows machine right now, so I can't test it. If it worked, it would be nice if one had a lot of layers, but often it is just in the way.

Edit: Oh, I think someone mentions it in the bug report. I should read the whole thing next time instead of just scrolling and reading bits.

markjensen wrote:Isn't it a search box? It doesn't seem work for some reason though, but I think it's a built-in GTK-search-thing because it looks like the one that shows up when you type something in Nautilus (file manager in Ubuntu) and in lists in general. I'm on a windows machine right now, so I can't test it. If it worked, it would be nice if one had a lot of layers, but often it is just in the way.

Edit: Oh, I think someone mentions it in the bug report. I should read the whole thing next time instead of just scrolling and reading bits.

That's what I thought it was, a search box for searching for a layer. Since it only ever comes up by accident I'd never actually tried to test it out to see if it worked.