Hi all,
I found that when navigating the pictures in the lighttable with the arrow keys (say the rightward pointing arrow key), once the current picture (as selected by the arrow movement) reaches the bottom (or the top) of the screen, the selection jumps erratically, i.e., it doesn’t move predictably to the next picture in the following row. Is this by design and has anybody else observed this?
thanks in advance for any comment
giuseppe
What is often misunderstood by those new to Darktable is that in lighttable - the mouse cursor actually overrides the arrow keys. (There is probably a better way to describe this?).
Basically - for reasons in the long distant past - the Darktable developers thought that having the mouse cursor do double duty as both the navigation keys and selection keys was a way to speed-up the typical actions someone takes within lighttable.
The issue is that this is not what people expect from previous experience from MacOS or Windows or the majority of Linux…
There are a few threads on this forum already that discuss the pros & cons of such a “feature”. The feature is so deeply embedded in how Darktable & lighttable work - it is not an easy job to change or make it select-able by configuration.
What I do - is make sure that the mouse cursor is off to the side out of the screen boundary when I wish to use keyboard navigation within lighttable.
Hope this helps minimize your confusion.
Thank you so much @Roger.Wilco , the jumping around was driving me crazy! Yes, moving aside the mouse cursor works like a charm.
thanks again
giuseppe
Hi Giuseppe,
I am on a Windows computer and I can not replicate your issue. Both the arrow keys and the mouse cursor respond as I would expect. What OS are you using? I wonder if that is part of the issue?
I’m not sure about WIndows as I run Darktable on Linux.
To repeat @gpagnon’s problem.
In a library of images greater than what can fit into one lighttable screen.
Under normal GUI behavior - you’d expect that if you press the “=>” arrow again it should just shuffle the grid up one row exposing the row of images that would have been just off the bottom of the screen. With the first image in that newly exposed row to be highlighted.
Instead - what happens is that as the grid shuffles. The image highlight jumps to the image under the the mouse cursor - in the middle of the screen. Meaning that you have to “=>” arrow across images you have already navigated across previously.
It is quite confusing when you first come across this. It just seems broken.
The easiest way to avoid this inconsistency is to move the mouse cursor away from the lighttable image grid. The fastest way I have found is to bump the mouse cursor to the very edge of the screen - then use the arrow keys. The navigation works as you expect then.
I remember another thread on here that complained about exactly the same thing. I remember replying to the thread. But today when I searched - I cannot find. My reply doesn’t appear in my history either. So I’m assuming that maybe there was some data loss when the server died recently? It was in that thread where I learnt what I wrote above in my previous reply.
Yes I did replicate the issue when I sat the mouse cursor in the middle of the image group. I guess I am so used to defaulting to the mouse cursor instead of arrow keys that I never noticed this strange behaviour. Is it worth putting in a bug report or feature request?
My understanding from the thread that I now cannot find… was that it is a “feature” and was an early design decision.
It is a strange behaviour for those that are new to Darktable and come from traditional GUI paradigms of MS Windows or MacOS X. Like all software - once you know the quirk (“feature”) it is easy to work around or use its power.
As you yourself said - you’d never noticed it until now as you mainly use the mouse. Which is how lighttable seems to have been designed to be (mostly) used.
I just wish it was a config option. Which I understand is not possible.
Yes, I had posted a while ago about another problem which I now understand is related to the same issue: when you select a bunch of pictures in the lighttable for tagging, but then the cursor happens to have moved to some other image, the tags are applied not to the selected images but to the image under the cursor.
Again, this is very counterintuitive and perhaps a legacy from the early days of dt, which I understand may be difficult to change. I would vote for an option to have this behavior inactivated by config, but I agree that it is easy to circumvent once you know it (although the stray cursor issue still manages to inflict its annoyance on my tagging every now and then).