Dear Digikam devs

I have been editing a larger number of photos over the last few days and in the last hour, I had to xkill the Showfoto-Window at least four times because the GUI did not respond anymore. There is no CPU load, the GUI simply does not react to input and the window client area does not redraw after resizing.

I do as much as possible with the keyboard to speed up my workflow. For that, I set up shortcuts to open my most used tools and use (shift+)tab in the tool settings and press Enter or Escape to execute and cancel the tool, respectively.

So the usual flow for an image is: use several tools in quick succession: rotate, resize, denoise, crop, local contrast and so on, each by pressing the relevant shortcut, amending settings values if necessary and pressing enter or the proper shortcut for the OK button. Finally I press Ctrl+S to save and Space to open the next image.

I haven’t been able to narrow down the exact cause. It appears as though there might be happening race conditions between the GUI events, because I press the keys in a rather quick succession. Sometimes I observe a hickup, like when I open the denoise tool and then press enter too quickly, the tool does not use the values from its last execution (and which are already visible in the settings area), but rather the default values.

I wanted to write a ticket about better keyboard handling in general, but the issue I am reporting in this ticket is a different problem altogether.

Kind regards