missing transform handles in AI

I was having trouble with not seeing rotate handles so that's why I landed on this page. None of these solutions worked for me. What did work was closing and the reopening the file. I had let the file sit open on my computer for a few days so that might have been the cause. Just a guess since im new at this.

Thank you Thank you Thank you!

Thank you!

I had this exact same problem! I went through everything on this thread with no luck then realised it was really simple.

Once you've selected the points using the Direct Selection tool, you need to press 'E' (or click the Free Transform tool button) to make the handles appear.

I'm sure the handles used to appear by default when using the Direct Selection tool, apparently now they don't.

Not sure if this happened to anyone else, but after going through and confirming that all the noted above possible issues had been tried, I found I was still having the similar issue where only sometimes they would show and in other cases it still would not.

I was working with a file I had not created the final version myself. So there were parts, and clipping masks, and odd groups of pieces  all over the place.

I found 2 things happened to me that I didn't come accross in other postings. Hope it may help someone else too. It took me hours of testing, and manipulating to find this out by accident.

In a group of items, if there was a clipping mask, the bounding box and edges etc would not show for me. As soon as I removed the clipping mask (oddly enough, there were some in the file that just did not need to be there...) the edges and the bounding box would appear again.

Then, I ran accross a group of parts, and it was happening again! I was really frustrated. After some more messing around, and searching the group of parts (they had every single part all in one layer) to find all of it to be sure that there was not the same issue as before, I found one stray piece in the group that was way off to the other end of the board. It was off screen from where I was working. Had the bounding box, or edges been working properly, I would have caught it faster. Once it was no longer part of the group that was all in the same place, the bounding box and edges returned again.

Wish I could explain why that happened, or if either of those were an actual issue, or just coincidence.  But if it wasn't, hopefully I was able to share something that helps someone else!

Closing open web browsers strangely enough works for me.

I had the same problem. View > Show Edges worked for me... or CTRL-H (Cmd-H).

You may have accidentally hit CTRL-H (Cmd-H) to hide your anchor points?
Although I don;t know why it would only work on a few shapes and not work on others. (Odd...)