Main Panel accidental tool switching

[JamesHeelis]

Hello TVPaint community!

I'm having an issue with the main panel and subtool selection. I've been using TVPaint for about 4 years now and I always felt that when switching between tools (ie, From Stroke -> Cut brush), the tool would randomly switch to a different subtool (ie, my cutting tool is set to free selection but randomly switches to rectangle selection).

At first, I thought this was a bug, but I realized that, especially when drawing quickly, I would select a tool and for a very brief moment and it brings up the subtool menu. I accidently select topmost subtool as I'm lifting my stylus, only to be frustrated a second later when the tool is doing a rectangle selection as opposed to my intended free selection.

While the interface is indeed working as intended, I think that the menu being on the left-side of the screen and the drawing area being to the right of the menu by default leads to this brief accidental selection of the subtool. Im not a UI designer but I think a solution to this issue may be to require more than .5 seconds to enable a selection of a subtool.

I suppose I should just learn the shortcut so I don't select the tool by hand, but it has become second-nature to select the tools quickly on the top-left of the interface. I think I've seen previous threads about this issue but no bug was ever discovered, and I think I've discovered the reason for this quirk.

Anyways, thank you for reading. I love TVPaint. Hope everyone is staying happy and safe

[Xavier]

Imagine you're drawing on paper : what do you use for drawing ? a tool.
Then, what do you draw using the tool ? a stroke, a circle, a rectangle or a spline -> all are shapes. And yet when you select another shape, the tool remains the same. Like if you were drawing on paper using the same pen/pencil/brush.

So the first line, except the paint bucket, should be considered as drawing shapes, not tools :

Capture d’écran_2021-09-14_11-19-11.png (7.86 KiB) Viewed 5328 times

For all of these drawing shapes, you can notice that a separate tool selection panel appears (usually, below the color palette) :

Capture d’écran_2021-09-14_11-23-42.png (15.13 KiB) Viewed 5328 times

Then on the second and third line, after the shapes, there are items that are tools.

Capture d’écran_2021-09-14_11-34-24.png (14.57 KiB) Viewed 5328 times

But then you can also notice that they're not meant for drawing, and the tool selection panel disappears when you activate one of these tools. That's because it is no use there. These tools have specific options that are shown instead of the tool selection panel :

Capture d’écran_2021-09-14_11-38-40.png (14.27 KiB) Viewed 5327 times

[Xavier]

I agree the documentation could be a little confusing to start with : https://www.tvpaint.com/doc/tvp11/index ... esentation