Sometimes just stops working completely

I love this product and have been a loyal user for years. I really really want it to continue to be a success and get more widely known as an alternative to PS. When it works, it’s amazing. But sometimes it just…stops working completely! Right now I can’t erase, paint, or pencil. When this happens I’ve reflexively started going through every layer, placing some marching ants and hitting enter to deselect whatever might be reading as active. It usually works but I hate that I even have to do that. Right now that’s not doing it, and neither is quitting and restarting.

Update: I saw Crop had a pink corner so, taking this to be a focus indicator, I clicked it to try to deselect. But of course then I was stuck in crop mode and had to initiate cropping (and lose everything and hit Undo) to get my cursor back. NOW I can draw. But: the pink triangle is still there so I know that wasn’t a focus indicator, and can only assume nuking everything made it clear out some background task that was taking priority. It’s frustrating how random it is.

Hello @katelyn ,

Sorry you’re running into troubles.

If you have a selection that’s getting in the way of drawing (which is handy when you want it, but obviously not in this case), you can deselect everything using the Select ▸ Clear Selection menu item (also available via ⌘D). The enter key won’t deselect anything, so maybe that’s why you weren’t able to clear it.

Clicking on a tool from the tool palette won’t deselect it - you’ll want to select another tool. In this case, you might switch to the Move tool, which is in the top left corner. It’s pretty much the default tool for most tasks. Its shortcut key is ‘v’.

I you run into a reproducible case where you can get Acorn to stop behaving correctly, I’d love to know about it!

-gus