Factorio Forums

The short version: Changing items while placing circuit wire changes the 'hand' on the quickbar whilst only aborting placing the wire; held item does not actually change from the wire.

Have a quickbar setup like this:
1: Something not a wire. (Mines a decon planner)
2: Green wire. (Both green/red work, but I'm going to use green in the steps below.)

- Pickup the green wire and click on an entity so the wire is half-attached and follows the cursor.
- Press '1' to switch to something else (or click it, that works too).

The 'hand' on the quickbar indicating selection has switched to whatever the new thing you've clicked on is, however, the actual item in your hand is still the green wire, but now with the wire attaching cancelled.
Either the item you're holding should have changed, or the 'hand' on the quickbar shouldn't have; I'm not sure which is the bug.

EDIT:
Also, Pressing 'q' when placing wires aborts placing wires but also removes/clears the 'hand' from the quickbar even though the player is still holding the wire.

Definitely something fishy about circuit wires currently.

But there is a similar case when you for example pick a stack of inserters from inventory and then close inventory. Now even if you have the the inserters in a shown quickbar slot, it doesn't have the hand. It's still in the inventory, not shown on screen anymore.

Because quickbar is just a reference to item in inventory, i wanted to suggest that all references of same item should get a hand icon (a place to return the item with single click). It should squash the wire bug too unless there is something even more bugged in its behavior, which is also possible.
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=66557

Thanks for the report, it is now fixed for the next release (0.17.15)