Select tile in the tileset tab, set as brush?

MarkOates · August 19, 2025, 10:18pm

Hi! UX/usability question:

I’d like to be able to select a tile from the tileset tab (not the pane below the list of layers, but the fullscreen view of the tilemap in its top-level window tab), and have that become the active tile that I use for drawing.

When editing a tilemap, I find that using the smaller window on the right to select the tile is bit cumbersome. Difficult to scroll through, takes up space. So, I setup a hotkey to view the tileset tab so I can get all the tiles in fullscreen - but, alas I discover that selecting a tile from here it does not make it the active drawing tile.

Are there any thoughts/options here? I’m down to script if that’s what it takes.

Thanks.

bjorn · August 19, 2025, 10:36pm

Ah, I’ve actually implemented this a while back (apparently it’s been two years, time flies…):

As indicated by the comment, it’s kind of hanging on the addressing of a somehow related issue:

github.com/mapeditor/tiled

Switching tilesets overwrites current brush

opened 01:54AM - 10 Apr 23 UTC

eishiya

bug usability

When switching tilesets in the Tilesets panel, the brush is set to the currently… selected tiles in that tileset. This overwrites any currently set brush, and if the tileset previously had multiple tiles selected, as happens when painting with a larger brush, it's overwritten by the arrangement of those tiles in the tileset, which is rarely useful. ![brushoverwrite](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/70545646/230807244-4065a2a2-a9f8-4599-a1a6-f37e00ca32b1.gif) **To Reproduce** This requires that at least two tilesets are available in the Tilesets panel. 1. Sample some tiles from a map into a brush, or choose a saved stamp. For the clearest results, this brush should consist of tiles that aren't all together in the tileset. 2. Go to another tileset tab. 3. Observe that the brush you just spent time making has been overwritten by whatever tiles were selected in that tileset. 4. Switch back to the previous tileset. 5. Observe that your brush is *again* changed, this time to the relevant tiles from your sampled brush, but as they occur in the tileset rather than your original brush. **Expected behaviour** Switching to a different tileset should not modify the brush if doing so would be destructive or would be likely to produce a garbage brush. I can think of two concrete ways to make this decision: - Simple: Do not modify the current brush if it has an area larger than 1x1 or has more than one layer. This would prevent complex brushes from being overwritten, but would also result in "false positives" - for example, if I select a 3x3 tree in Tileset A and switch to Tileset B where previously had a 5x5 house selected, I probably wouldn't mind having my tree overwritten by that house, and then having the house overwritten by the tree when I switch back to Tileset A. It would also overwrite 1x1 brushes that have been flipped/rotated, but this is not a big loss. Lastly, it would still produce nonsense brushes like in the above GIF, if the previous brush was a single tile - you wouldn't *lose* anything, but you'd still get garbage. - Complex: Do not modify the current brush if the tile(s) in the newly selected tileset and/or in the current brush were selected by means other than manually selecting from a tileset or sampling a single tile from a map/selecting a single-tile, single-layer stamp. Brushes with multiple layers or using tiles from multiple tilesets should never be overwritten. This would prevent the aforementioned false positives, because it would allow Tiled to distinguish between multi-tile arrangements selected from the tileset by the user (=probably sensible) from multiple tiles that are selected from being in some other arrangement in a map or stamp. This one would probably not overwrite any brush that has been flipped, for better or worse. This one can be further improved by counting map selections and saved stamps that are identical to the tiles' arrangement in the tileset as direct selections. Perhaps trivial flips can also be ignored (i.e. if you select a bunch of tiles from a tileset and flip them, that can count as a simple brush that can be overwritten). The above GIF is from Tiled 1.10.1 64-bit on Windows 10, but I'm pretty sure this has been happening since 1.8 and quite likely much earlier. This is a usability problem rather than a bug, but it sure *feels* like a bug when your brush gets mangled by switching tilesets xP

I’ll see if we can move forward with that change. I’ve in any case rebased it to trigger an updated build, so you could test it out.

MarkOates · August 19, 2025, 11:04pm

OK - I’m happy to try the build. In my case, I’m only working with one tileset (for now), so I should be ok.

It looks like the build is still yellow. How/where can I access it when it’s ready?

bjorn · August 20, 2025, 8:44am

It’s done in the meantime, the files can be downloaded here (if you’re logged into GitHub):

MarkOates · August 20, 2025, 5:19pm

OK, I downloaded this Aug 19 build and was able to run on MacOS, but selecting a tile in the tileset view does not seem to affect the selected tile in the side panel (e.g. globally)?

I double checked the version, and also tried closing and re-opening the relevant files in the project. I also tried selecting from the tileset panel and then seeing if it affected the tileset view, but it didn’t seem to go that direction either.

bjorn · August 20, 2025, 9:12pm

Hmm, you’re right it no longer works for some reason. I’ll have a look into that tomorrow!

bjorn · August 21, 2025, 10:49am

@MarkOates Somehow the patch got broken during a rebase last year. I’ve fixed it up now, so these builds should work now:

MarkOates · August 22, 2025, 2:45am

OK - I was able to get the Tiled-2025.08.21_macOS-10.13-10.15.app version to start after clearing it with sudo xattr -cr /path/to/Tiled_Aug_21_2025.app. (I’m on an M1).

For some reason the macOS-11+ version binary didn’t seem to want to start, despite clearing the xattr in the same way. The application would “start” (I would get feedback from the OS that the program start was recognized), but it wouldn’t appear on the doc, show error popups, or output any error messages when run from the terminal.

That’s a different issue, though.

Regardless! The tile selection feature is really really nice ! With a hotkey, I’m able to switch into the tileset view, see all the tiles in my immensely large tileset and pick from there. Thank you so much - I think you should add it to master

bjorn · August 22, 2025, 8:52am

Ah, right. I should probably start doing my own pull requests from branches in the main repository again, since those could be codesigned and notarized then.

That’s great, thanks for testing it out! Yes, I’ll definitely be looking to merge this as soon as I’ve dealt with the feedback from eishiya.

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Select tile in the tileset tab, set as brush?

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