How do I cut pixels?

[bkorb]

OK. I'm now completely convinced: there are some obscure settings that effectively disable GIMP. Is there a straight forward way to reset ~/.config/GIMP/2.10 or ~/.gimp-2.8 ? Probably, I can just blow the latter away. It looks like an old dinkleberry.

<time passes>

I renamed GIMP/2.10 out of the way and restarted GIMP. I get the same behavior. Benefit of new directory: all the tool windows are once again attached to the main window. Sadly, I did click on the brush attributes a few times and GIMP decided that that meant I wanted to detach the brush attributes window. I did not. I also don't know how to put it back. Dragging the window into the tool bar of the main window normally does stuff like that. Nope. I've just been putting up with it rather than chasing down exactly how to fix it. -- I got used to the way Chrome and Photoshop work, just grabbing the menu bar instead of the folder tab under the menu bar. "Never mind."

Anyway, I tried to screen grab your line of dots to paste into my doc -- no go. If you look at the feint selection on the paste layer, you see there are no data there. Consequently, "merge down" is disabled. I can't show you that because when the menu is active, the screen capture is disabled. "Clever." I guess I do need to go back and re-enable that alpha thingy.

So, I have a brand new GIMP/2.10 directory that is presumably populated with the defaults and GIMP is still non-functional.