It would be useful sometimes, when using large multiple-tile stamps, to rotate the stamp layout, but not the tile graphics. For example, say I have defined a stamp of some forest terrain with trees, rocks, grass, etc. It could be re-used as “random” variants by rotating it to different orientations - but I don’t want the trees and rocks to be lying on their sides. I just want the unchanged tiles put into the new rotated positions within the stamp.
This would obviously have to be offered as an option somehow, since there is definite need for the tile rotation functionality as well.
In addition, isometric games in particular often have tiles that should map to other tiles when rotated. It would be very helpful if Tiled could support this kind of mapping while rotating the tile stamp. But of course that’s going to be more complicated.
I’m not sure how to put this in the UI though. I can’t really use modifier keys because that would lead to conflicts with other shortcuts. In addition that would be hard to discover and probably not convenient to use. I could consider adding a toggle button to the tool bar to enable or disable rotation of the tile graphic. The main problem with this is that the tool bar is already crowded, and also to come up with an understandable icon for the action. Alternatively it would be a checkbox in the preferences, which may not be a bad idea since it I think it’s somewhat unlikely that one would use both kinds of rotation in the same project.
The isometric situation you mentioned complicates the idea I’m about to throw out, but perhaps a distinction could be made between the two modes depending on whether you are rotating a stamp that consists of a single tile vs. a stamp constructed of multiple tiles. Though it’s possible you might want the graphic rotation for multi-tile constructs as well in some cases. The icon is less problematic in my opinion, but then again I’m an artist.
Instead of adding a whole toggle button to the toolbar, you could also add a small arrow that expands a menu next to it, like you already have done for executing commands.
This could also be done for some of the other toolbar buttons, such as the flipping tiles buttons. I don’t think there are many people flipping it horizontal and then flipping it vertical.
And while out of scope of this issue, it makes me think that the undo- and redo buttons also could use such an arrow with a list to undo/redo multiple tasks at once.