#8 Support 'eraser' on tablets (e.g., Wacom)

[William Kendrick]

It would be nice to support the 'eraser' end of a drawing tablet's
stylus. (e.g., automatically switch to eraser mode when the
stylus is upside-down; switch back to the previous mode when
the stylus is right-side-up)

[William Kendrick]

Logged In: YES
user_id=132410
Originator: YES

Note: SDL 1.3 will include tablet (e.g., Wacom) support. Once that happens, we can look into adding this (and pressure sensitivity) to Tux Paint.

[William Kendrick]

SDL 1.3 became SDL 2.0. There's a fork of Tux Paint that uses SDL 2.0, kept in sync by Pere, and used to produce the Android port. I think once we (I?) finally decide to drop SDL 1.2 and only focus on 2.0, we can finally do this.

How the UI would work is an interesting question, as Paint and Erase are separate tools. Would Tux Paint switch from current tool to Eraser when you flip the stylus? And if you flip back to the drawing side of the stylus, would it go to the previous tool, or always the Paint brush tool? What if you were already in the Eraser tool, though?

We could use the Paint tool's current brush as the eraser shape (vs. the square and circular ones found in Eraser), but then how would users who aren't using a tablet+stylus be able to do this?

[William Kendrick]

Seems like SDL2 doesn't yet support this(!) https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/issues/2217 but someone has done some work over in https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/pull/5481

So we continue to wait. However, a shortcut key for keyboard+mouse users could be helpful, a la the recently-added feature where Ctrl can be held in many situations to bring up a color picker pipette.

Then, once we can detect tablet stylus' erasers, we can just use that.

[William Kendrick]

Replaced by https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/pull/8058 which was merged 2 weeks ago and looks like it will be in SDL3!!!