GIMP Users,

I use a Wacom tablet to draw in GIMP on a Linux computer. It has pressure sensitivity and draws quite smoothly and overall is working great.

However, the ideal way to work with a tablet in a graphics application is in "Window" mode, so that the entire surface of the tablet corresponds to the entire area of the window for the image being worked on.

Using the latest Wacom drivers, this is possible, but with some severe caveats. The main one being that having "SendCoreEvents" enabled in one's xorg.conf is completely incomatible with GIMP's Window Mode.

Just to be clear, "SendCoreEvents" means that the tablet will move the mouse cursor for everything that you do with a mouse, like navigate around the OS.

To make a long story short, here's what I'm currently doing. The Wacom tablet has 3 "devices" on it, the "cursor", which is the wireless mouse, the "stylus" which refers specifically to the pen tip end of the pen, and the "erasor" which refers to the other end of the pen.

So what I've done is I've removed the "SendCoreEvents" option from the "erasor" device. This allows me to set the "erasor" end of my pen to be in Window Mode in GIMP.

This means I can use the pen tip end of the pen to select from menus, navigate around the OS, open and close GIMP, and that sort of thing. And then I just flip around the pen to and use the "erasor" to actually draw on the image.

I could have mixed up any combination, like make the pen tip end the one I draw with, and the erasor the one to navigate the OS with, or brought the mouse into it. But for a variety of reasons, I found this one to be the most comfortable for me.

In any case, the limitations I'm about to describe apply regardless of which device I set and how I set it.

The thing about "Window" mode is that you can't touch the menus. The mouse cursor will only go to the edge of the drawable area, and no further. If I have a dialog box, like the tools panel or the colour selector, over top the drawable area of the image window, my erasor will go *under* the dialog window. Basically, Window Mode is very strict - you can only move within the drawable area of the window. Nothing else can be touched.

This can almost be worked around. For example, if I want to change the tool for my "erasor", I can use a keyboard shortcut.

But what if I'm drawing with the pencil tool, and I want to change it's colour from black to red. Well, I can use a keyboard shortcut to open the colour selector. But, I can't actually change the colour because the tool won't go into the colour selector window. If I flip my pen over and use the pen tip end to select a new colour... that doesn't work because each tool remembers its own colour. As soon as I flip the pen back to the "erasor", the colour goes back to black.

Some other things just seem to not work. For example, I can increase and drecrease the size of my brushes with the "[" and "]" keys. But that doesn't seem to work regardless of what tool I use with the "erasor".

Okay, so where am I going with this?

Well, I'm wondering if there aren't some solutions out there.

Like can I resolve the conflict between "SendCoreEvents" and GIMPs "Window Mode"? I've talked about this before on the Linuxwacom mailing list, with the people who develop the Wacom drivers, and they say it's something to do with the way the application handles cursor locations. I assume that means that it's up to GIMP as to whether or not this can ever get resolved.

Otherwise, is there a way I can further work around this limitation? Like, for changing colour, can I do that entirely with the keyboard so that I'm not stopped by the fact that the "erasor" in Window mode won't go into the dialog box?

Or is there a way I can make it so that my colour and size selections on my tools are universal?

Any advice would be much appreciated.

Thanks.