Text selection stops working

[marilmanen]

This is a strange issue and I have not been able to find a way to reproduce it, but it seems to happen when I reconnect to my remote desktop.

Sometimes I loose possibility to select any text from the nedit-ng edit area. Selection can't be done with mouse or with Shift+arrow keys. The issue is related to existing nedit-ng windows only i.e. selection in terminal and other applications is still working correctly. Any new nedit-ng window that I start works also correctly. I have not found any way to enable selection on a broken nedit-ng window.

[eteran]

Very strange indeed. Since you can't reproduce it, does that mean that it's only happened once? Or has this happened a few times?

Also, did other forms of input work like typing and moving the cursor around? Was it just selection that stopped working, or all mouse input for that window?

I'll see if I can get to the bottom of it if we can narrow it down slightly.

[marilmanen]

It has happened about 5 to 10 times, so I thought it's worth reporting. Everything else works, but now that I think it, I'm not sure if it's just a highlight issue. Selecting text with mouse moves the cursor to the selection end point and maybe the selected text is just not marked as selected. I'll need to double check it, but my feeling is that it is a selection issue and not just a highlight issue.

[eteran]

OK, that's a very strange issue indeed. I'll keep an eye out for it

[anjohnson]

I have seen this a couple of times on RHEL 7.7, after I've had a single nc-ng session running for many days (weeks maybe), and possibly a weekend's inactivity too. It required shutting down that session and starting a new server, I couldn't get text selection working again in the broken session.

[rnhaddad]

Happens very frequently in fact. To resolve, i have to re-open some files.

[eteran]

@anjohnson @rnhaddad Are you both also using a remote desktop of some kind? Also, what distro are you guys using, it makes me wonder if it's a Qt bug you're encountering... I dunno.

I've never had this happen to me, so I'm not quite sure where to start when looking into it yet, but I'll see what I can come up with.

[anjohnson]

I am not using a remote desktop; my setup is a pair of monitors connected to a single NVIDIA Quadro 2000 card with the X11 server on RHEL-7.7, Linux 3.10.0-862.6.3.el7.x86_64 with DISPLAY=:0. The libQt* RPMs that nedit-ng is linking against are:

qt5-qtbase-5.9.7-2.el7.x86_64
qt5-qtx11extras-5.9.7-1.el7.x86_64
qt5-qtbase-gui-5.9.7-2.el7.x86_64

I don't get these symptoms very often and haven't seen them in several months now so I can't be sure if they are still happening. It sounds like @rnhaddad might be more useful than me in tracking this down.

[eteran]

@rnhaddad @anjohnson have either of you experienced this recently? I've never been able to reproduce this locally :-(.

[anjohnson]

I haven't been using nedit-ng continuously on my RHEL-7 box much since $WORK went remote back in March. I have never seen this on the MacOS laptop I have at home, but that device can't seem to stay alive for weeks on end like that workstation does, so I can't confirm whether it still happens or not – sorry!

[rnhaddad]

@eteran still happening. Any new changes you want me to try out (I am still using a relatively old SHA).

[eteran]

I certainly like to think that it has been improved a bunch :-).

Mostly it's been a lot of internal stuff and bug fixes though. I made a big fix to the macro system recently. Depending on how old your version is, I may or may not have inadvertently fixed this issue by refactoring other code, so if you're interested in doing so, I'd love to know if you still experience this issue.

Thanks!

[marilmanen]

I have been using version from April and with it I have seen issues with text selection. I'm currently updating to the latest version and let you know in case I can still see the issue with text selection.