P: Completely broken Hand tool (PS24.5) Hand Tool Sticking, sticky, not seeing mouse-up

[Jqqerry]

This is a bug. Please don't move it to the Discussions tab.

And please don't merge into another unrelated thread. I will report a bug with this thread.

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I made a YouTube video using a keyboard mouse overlay to show what action I'm taking. I hope you can refer to refer to it.

https://youtu.be/Cle6dEgP5_Y

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I was disappointed that there were so many bugs that were not fixed in 24.5, but I was still trying to give it a shot.

However, this bug is pretty serious. Really...

Please see the video I attached.
If you watch the video, you will see that I am shaking the screen.
I'm not using a hand tool, it should release automatically, but that thing is sticky.

To release this sticky, pinned handtool, you'll need to make one more unconditional click.

Here's how I've organized them for your reference.

< What I can be sure of >

1. Window10 (Tested a total of 14 PCs)
2. Use WacomTablet
3. Not related to preferences at all (Especially not related to Spring loaded, Flick panning stuff things)
4. I've tried all the known Photoshop troubleshooting methods and no improvement.
5. Even reinstalling Windows does the same thing
6. Only in 24.5 does this bug occur with certainty. I can't reproduce it at all in earlier versions.

< I'm not sure about the >

1. Mac OS not tested
2. I couldn't even test if it was a GPU company difference. I and my team all use NVIDIA

And while there are a few threads pointing this out, there doesn't seem to be a proper plan to fix it.

If this is not fixed in 24.6, 24.6 will be equally unusable as 24.5.

Also check out the links below.

https://community.adobe.com/t5/photoshop-ecosystem-discussions/hand-tool-lock-after-releasing-spaceb...

https://community.adobe.com/t5/photoshop-ecosystem-bugs/some-ps-tools-keep-reading-wacom-pen-after-l...

https://community.adobe.com/t5/photoshop-ecosystem-discussions/hand-tool-won-t-let-go-of-image/m-p/1...

https://community.adobe.com/t5/photoshop-ecosystem-bugs/24-5-impossible-to-use-with-wacom-intuos-on-...

(cjbutler 1/12/24: edited title from "not reverting to cursor" to "not seeing mouse up" to reflect latest focus on lost mouse-up as root cause, and not just a stale cursor setting.)

[Ex-photo printer]

I used it for about an hour yesterday,  mostly with a Wacom tablet and pen. Had no problems, even when I tried to get it to stick by holding the space bar down and quickly panning the image around.  Before I had to move it rather slowly,  and release the space bar before relocating the pen. So, looks good. I'll be doing much more work next week.  I'll let you know if I have any problems. 

[MarinMarina]

I've updated to 25.6 and as of today, I don't see the issue anymore with the mouse.

However.

Now GPU acceleration turns off randomly as I'm trying to work. I work with shapes constantly and I have my lines colored green. In the middle of work my image will blink, became lanky and the green lines turn gray. It won't go away unless I restart the app only for it to happen again minutes after restarting, This has to be the worst version to date. I wish for once instead of adding new features Adobe would dedicate to fix known bugs. I can assure you, users prefer that.

[chrisell99]

I've been using it for about a day now without any issues (mouse only).  I still have some other unrelated issues from other topics, but this one in particular appears to be cured for me now.

[Kuttyjoe]

I reported this issue with 25.5 and feared that it would still be broken in 26.X.  GPU acceleration breaks immediately upon opening a new document.  26.X is doing exactly the same thing.  I'm really, really frustrated with trying to upgrade, only to downgrade 5 minutes later, then fear the next update.

[CJButler]

> Now GPU acceleration turns off randomly as I'm trying to work. 

Please start a new thread with this problem, along with your system information and anything you can think of that might help Adobe reproduce this problem. GPU issues are handled by a different team, and we'll need to let them investigate. This thread is too large; any information posted here runs a high risk of being lost. Thanks.

(This is something that would normally be done by a Community Manager. Alas, I am not such a person.)

[Denyerpro]

Tone is tricky on the internet, so trust me when I tell you this is good
natured - I'd love to see a technical write-up of exactly what was
causing this and what was done to resolve it; for one it's fascinating
and as a bonus, given the length of this issue and the hair-tearing
nature of it for many of us, it'd be really insightful to get a glimpse
into what went on. Hopefully legal can sign off on something like that!

[CJButler]

> I'd love to see a technical write-up of exactly what was causing this

I posted something earlier with details (March 8).

Our inability to reliably reproduce was what prevented us from making progress on the bug.

My assessment is that the dominant element that was preventing us from reproducing the bug and making progress was that Photoshop was not calling the Windows OS function EnableMouseInPointer(false) on startup. Photoshop is an old application, and this function was added when Microsft rolled out Pen/Stylus support. Because of how Microsoft implemented the behavior of this function, if it is not set at application launch, the application property bit can be set to 'true' ANY time by ANY subprocess. For most of us at Adobe, we theorize it was not being set and so stayed 'false' for the session. For users consistently experiencing the problem, we theorize that something, some code somewhere, was consistently setting EnableMouseInPointer(true) for them when they ran Photoshop. We still do not know what that was, but it literally could be anything, including Chrome libraries, or any third-party technology we embed in Photoshop. It's also possible that Microsoft was setting this property to 'false' earlier for us as a legacy application, but that we fell off their "special cases list" (yes - they do that sort of thing. So does Apple.) and things started breaking as soon as the Photoshop version advanced enough to not longer be considered a special case. Or perhaps a Windows update somehow lost track of treating Photoshop as a special case. We don't know.

EnableMouseInPointer(true) tells Windows that Photoshop is "pointer-aware", and that it is ok to send us just Pointer messages, and not synthesize mouse messages. But Photoshop is a legacy application and it is only partially pointer aware:  for example, Painting is largely pointer aware with things like pen pressure, but much of the other Tracker code (like the Hand Tool or Marquee Tool) is not. The older code assumes just mouse behavior and we expect to get mouse-button events. No WM_LBUTTONUP event for those trackers means that we never see the mouse-up. And that's the observed bug.

Once we figured out that we needed to explicitly call this function and declare ourselves a legacy application, this allowed us to make progress. Windows was not consistent when it would decide to not synthesize WM_LBUTTONUP, leading to further unpredictability. In our explorations and debugging, we also found a few other problems with our usage of the Windows OS function PeekMessage when it was called with PM_REMOVE, especially when the Windows Message queue was very busy with a lot of queued messages (e.g. fast mouse or pen work). We're still reviewing and fixing those bits of code up to make them more reliable.

Personally, I think this method of requiring an application to declare itself as a legacy application via EnableMouseInPointer(false) was a terrible approach by Microsoft when it implemented Pen/Stylus event handling years ago. It is a very obscure OS function call with poor default behaviors.

[JDpsd]

@CJButlerThank you for the detailed explanation on the problem.

In my case, I have not encountered the problem anymore since the 25.6 update (so for the past 3 days).

I have to untrain myself again to just double-clicking always when using any tool XD

So at least for myself, I think the bug is finally fixed. Thank you and the Adobe team 🙂

[madhoek]

Hi there!
Thank you for the update!
I've only used 25.6 for 10 minutes now and I couldn't reproduce the bug yet. (mouse only)
What a relief!
On earlier 25. and latest 24. versions I could do it anytime, anywhere, right after starting Photoshop.
I really hope you smashed the bug with this fix!
Right now it seems I'm finally able to work with the latest version.
If it gets stuck again, I will definately report.
Big thumbs up Adobe, thank you!

[HuntingFluff]

Really pleased to read there's finally been some progress on this bug. I look forward to trying out the new update and thank you and the rest of the team for your open communication and efforts to fix the issue.

[Kuttyjoe]

25.2 worked for me for about a month, other than the daily crashes.  But now it's started with the sticky tools problem.  I don't even remember which version actually worked now.  26.5 brings new bugs that make it unusable.  I'm about to change my subscription to just Illustrator and use something else for image editing.  I'll save myself a little bit of money I guess.

[Chad Rolfs]

@Kuttyjoe Can you be more specific about what is going wrong for you with the latest update, 25.6?

[Kuttyjoe]

Scrubby Zoom breaks almost immediately upon opening any file of any size.  It's the same problem that Illustrator had.  There's a flash of the screen, then scrubby zooming stopps working and zooming  becomes slow and jerky.

[Fantoga]

Can confirm scrubby zoom issues and general navigation glitchiness and issues in last couple releases of Illustrator. Photoshop too but no deal breakers that destroy productivity like the sticky hand tool bug that finally seems fixed! Have yet to deploy in lab but Photoshop navigation and tool switching and such seems fine so far on test machine. Huge relief here. Thanks for resolving.

[Kuttyjoe]

I guess that is probably true.  But I'm tired of being aggravated by it.  Adobe was wonderful for a good 2 decades for me, but the last 4 or 5 years, Adobe software has been very buggy.  There were times when I couldn't find a single bug in Photoshop or Illustrator and that went on for years.  The good ole days.

[Chad Rolfs]

@Kuttyjoe Scrubby zoom issues are separate from this Hand tool sticking.  You should start a new post/thread on that issue and it could be GPU related.  Go to Preference > Performance and adjust some settings there to see if it helps things (i.e. try with/without Mutlithreaded compositing on/off, Advanced Settings... GPU compositing on/off).  Also go to Help > GPU Compatibility... and see if anything is needed there. 

[Jqqerry]

Has everyone fixed this bug? I'm just watching the thread because I can't test it because it's the busiest season. Also, since it is not included in fixed issue page (although it is natural because some changes are applied), I am curious about your opinion.

[Just-Justin]

In windows lastest photoshop(v25.6)

there is bug Causing the entire software to freeze:

When I hold down the space bar and the left mouse button to drag the screen, the mouse pointer will become stuck in the hand state after a few seconds. At this time, I cannot switch any tools or perform any operations, including but not limited to saving files. , close files, close software, etc. I can only call up the task manager to force it to close. I did two operations before discovering this bug, one was to install the font, and the other was to update the photoshop software. I thought there was something wrong with the font file and uninstalled the font. I even thought it was caused by residual files, so I reinstalled the operating system twice, but I didn't expect it to be a problem with Photoshop. It wasn't until after reinstalling the system for the second time that I thought there was only one possibility left, so I rolled back to the previous version, and this bug never appeared again.
In despair, I believed things I shouldn’t have believed.

When I returned to the Creative Cloud interface, it prompted me with a new update: Photoshop v25.6. This update contains "bug fixes, performance improvements, and some stability improvements."
How funny.

[Jqqerry]

https://community.adobe.com/t5/photoshop-ecosystem-bugs/p-completely-broken-hand-tool-ps24-5-hand-to...

The developer made some improvements, so the mouse users said it would be better. But it doesn't seem to have been fixed perfectly enough to be officially included in the fixed issue.
So I won't update until 25.7 or 25.8.
It's staying at 24.0.1.

[Just-Justin]

Yep, staying at old version could be better for me and you.

[Jqqerry]

@Just-Justin Yes. I keep the version for each year.
Actually, the most used version is Photoshop 2020 (21.0.3). It's the lightest. Fast and stable

[Kuttyjoe]

That's it for me. I just cancelled my subscription.  At this point Photoshop, and Illustrator are just too much of a distraction with all the bugs which are not getting resolved, and changes made to Bridge meant that I never upgraded beyond version 12, even as the cost goes up.  I'm going to have to figure out how to get along with something else plus the last version of Adobe CC that I bought before subscription pricing which actually had no bugs to bug me.

[Just-Justin]

I posted it been a week,would someone from adobe answer me ?

[A.L.5E2E]

Just to update on this: Unfortunately this bug is NOT fixed in this latest update, it is still happening for me after updating to 25.6 (on top of the other new issues that have been introduced).

It seems to happen now mostly when the application has been first opened, however, which is a different behaviour from before when it would happen all of the time.

EDIT: Never mind. It is still completely borked.

I will be cancelling my subscription for PS as well I think. This is just totally unacceptable. I get that this is a difficult issue to resolve, but it totally destroys the workflow in the application. In two months, it will have been a year left unresolved. 

[CJButler]

> ust to update on this: Unfortunately this bug is NOT fixed in this latest update, it is still happening for me after updating to 25.6

Since you are first person on this thread who says they can still reproduce with 25.6, a few questions if you don't mind:

1. Are you using just a Mouse, or are you using a Pen/Stylus? There are fixes in 25.7 intended to help with lost Pen Events.
2. What kind of gestures are you doing? Is it the Hand Tool as originally reported, or is it something else?
3. Would you mind generating an Event Log file using the instructions here?  And making that log file available to us on a site like DropBox?

Thanks.