Placeholders won't move (favorites panel)

[Mees Dekker]

I just noticed that in the favorites panel (right hand bottom corner) "reordering favorites" only works on real favorites. These will move accoring to the help (https://www.photools.com/help/imatch/fav_basics.htm)

Reordering Favorites
You can change the order of Favorites in the panel using the Ctrl key together with the Cursor up and down keys. This allows you to move the focused (yellow border) favorite up and down / left and right. You focus a favorite by left-clicking or by moving the focus with the cursor keys.

But when I want to move a placeholder by using "Ctrl+up", the placeholder will not move but instead the focus will move to the next "real favorite".

It is present on my desktop (W11) as well as on my laptop (W10). Restarting Imatch and/or rebooting my computers doesn't solve the problem. Ctrl key works on other commands as expected, as well in other applications.

Anything I misses out on?

[Mario]

I have no problems moving placeholders.
I have tried single-column layouts (Fav Panel docked to the left/right and narrow) and multi-column layouts (Favorite Panel docket to the bottom, with multiple favorites per row).
AFAIK, something similar was not reported before.
Anything special about your favorite layout?
Did you try to close and re-open the Favorite Panel?

[Mees Dekker]

Closing and re-opening the favorites panel does not make any change: placeholders will not move, "real favorites"do.

Also: "Alt-enter" does not work on placeholders (does not show the properties) but does work on "real favorites".

Nothing special in my favorites panel. All worked well until recently. Can't remember till what day, since I don't change the panel very often.

[Mario]

Alt+Enter does not work on Placeholders. It opens the properties dialog box. Placeholders have no properties.
Use right-click to open the context menu for Placeholders.
Do the Move Up / Move Down commands from the context menu work for your Favorites?

The only way I see for a fav not moving is a read-only database, or the favorite being part of a system set (folder/category hierarchy).

[Mees Dekker]

The favorites do all they should do. It is only about the placeholders that won't move with ctr-up or ctr-down.

And actually: a placeholder does have properties. One can change the text in and the colors of a placeholder. Moving a placeholder from the contextmenu works correctly. Also opening the properties of a placeholder can be opened and changed from the contextmenu.

So in short: ctr-up, ctr-down and alt-enter won't work on placeholders, but do work on real favorites.

Any clue of this? Hou could I help you to find the cause of this?

[Mario]

I've figured it out.
It all boils down to a missing branch in the code that is processed when a favorite is focused by user action.
In case of placeholders, the keyboard shortcuts from the PTR_MENU_FAVORITE_GENERIC were loaded, not the shortcuts for the PTR_MENU_FAVORITE_PLACEHOLDER menu.

This also explains why in my quick test last evening, moving favorites worked. I've added a few placeholders to the test database I was working on, and moving worked. But only because in this particular situation (new favorites), where the shortcuts were loaded properly.

This bug is very old, so I assume it did not affect many users. I have fixed that for the next release.
In the mean time, use the context menu commands of placeholders to move them, this should work just fine.

[Mees Dekker]

Top service.

Always improving Imatch.