Cross hairs becomes invisible in Zoom window and Stretch command

Nenad Bikicki

Since V10.2.08-1-en_US version (or few builds earlier) after starting command Zoom Window, cross hair cursor changes to magnifying lens sign. In that state program waits for you to select start point of rectangular selection, but you can't find out exact point you want. I thought that it was just a bug and reported it to Bricsys Customer Service and got the answer that it has been done on purpose. So, I would like to find out what other users think about this problem and to help me to persuade Bricsys developing team to solve it. Cross hairs are absolutely necessary when you exports part of drawing to Windows Metafile format, very handy during various commands  and I can't understand why they changed it at all.

I think that there was no need to hide cross hairs during first point of rectangle selection. Magnifying lens sign doesn't help in finding precise point, and in my oppinion it is quite unnecessary. The same thing happens during the Stretch command.

The way to avoid this inconvenience is to place crosshair cursor to the right position before command starting, but it needs your full attention to the command manipulating and some skill with mouse operating.

Nenad Bikicki

John Gaunt

I zoom using the mouse wheel so had not noticed, but it would not help. It's the sign I associate with RTZoom.

It's not helpful now the cross hairs disappear during the Stretch command, it's a pain.

Early Intellicad had no cross hairs when sitting idle, what a blessing it was when they were added.

Every time they turn off now I think of the Jim Reeves song "am I loosing you?"

Greg Skelhorn

My personal opinion is I like to see the crosshair cursor for pretty much everything and I keep it set to 100% screen size. That said, I am not sure what I would expect the crosshair to do during window operations when it is rotated. If the crosshair stayed I guess it would have to switch to be orthogonal to thedisplay up/down left/right as that is how the window is. I think I have a crosshair for all operations (like a fence) that can be done orthogonal to the crosshair orientation.

Sure would be cool if there was a simple way to ahve a rectangular selection window in the crosshair orientation...

 

Greg Skelhorn

I don;t generally use the stretch command by just looking at it now I still have my crosshair cursor. I am using 10.2.11 if that makes a difference.

Greg Skelhorn

Oops, ignore that last post, I see the issue was during picking the first point of a selection window.

Yaacov Lazar

I have a neat little lisp that draws a (yellow) dashed box in the current UCS using grread,

given the first point and a prompt string,

and returns the 4 endpoints of the box on the second click which can be used to choose the contents.

I developed it for a two-click wall trim lisp.

(defun %getcorner (^1 *s)
  (prompt *s)
  (setq @t T $p nil)
  (while @t 
    (setq $gr (grread 17)
          ^g  ^3
          ^3  (cadr $gr) 
          ^2  (list (car ^1) (cadr ^3)(caddr ^1))
          ^4  (list (car ^3) (cadr ^1)(caddr ^1))
@t  (if (= 3 (car $gr)) nil T)
    )
    (if (not (equal ^g ^3)) (progn
      (if (and $p (= 5 (car $gr))) (grvecs $p))
   (redraw)
      (setq $p (list -2 ^1 ^2 -2 ^2 ^3 -2 ^3 ^4 -2 ^4 ^1))
      (grvecs $p)
    ))
  )
  (redraw)
  (list ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4)
)