Selection of entities intermittent

Have scanned forum past posts and this has come up before but no answer (not from myself but another poster).

From time to time in a reasonably large .dxf file (3MB) I can no longer select individual entities. This is typically when using Trim or Offset. I can still select via rectangular select but not single clicks. You can sometimes make it work if you *very* carefully select in the centre of the line. Meaning only a single pixel will work.

From experience the problem tends to appear after copying and pasting a large number of elements in the drawing. But this may be anecdotal.

I can "fix" it by selecting all, copying and then pasting into a new file and save as a new name.

As per the previous post on this topic I have tried changing the scale but this doesn't change things.

While on this note, is it possible to have LibreCad "snap" to the closest item when clicking? or set a radius for clicks and it chooses the closest object?

Thanks

a

I seem to have the same problem using Librecad on Ubuntu 18.04. I have used it for many years, but now it seems to be unusable as I struggle to select entities. Anyone else have this problem?

Yes, see it consistently in large files that you have edited for a long time. Typically happens after you attempt to copy/paste large chunks of it.

There is an easy but non permanent fix that I have deduced after dealing with this for a long time.

1. make all layers visible
2. Ctrl-A (select all)
3. Copy, select an origin, any origin
4. Make a new file
5. Paste.

And Viola! you can select/trim/extend/etc again.  I have no idea what causes this but it has to be some zoom selection stuff up or something.

a

Thanks for the suggestion, but the copy solution did not seem to work for me as that I saw no option to copy into the new drawing.  However, I did find a solution whenever the "Lengthen" object command gave a "No entity found" message.  What worked for me was to:
 1) Close out the drawings and LibreCAD;
 2) Navigate to the working directory and carefully delete the .dfx~ file.  Obviously, I am careful and don't use wildcards as that I don't want to delete the .dfx file.  I assume the "tilde" file is some kind of redo/history file that gets recreated when starting an edit session.

Once the file was gone all the Lengthen functionality worked fine.  

Be very careful when doing the copy method!

In at least two opportunities I had worse problems afterwards.

After copying 'all' to a new file, it saves fine, but there is still a (hidden) problem remaining. Even
though, as reported, selecting started working again, but I had several crashes.

Eg. when simply editing the properties of a spline and saving again. Part of the drawing is
missing and LibreCAD hangs on loading *that* new file.

Do make a backup and change the new file's name so as not to loose previous versions!