Comment 4 for bug 1657874

Actually, the bug is simply triggered by clicking on the rotation center. This happens easily with small objects and requires each time an explicit tool switch to restore the transformation handles (I encountered this many times recently when editing an Inkscape icons file with rather small objects).

Steps to reproduce:
1) launch inkscape (0.92.x)
2) draw a rect
3) click once (LMB) to show the rotation transformation handles
4) click once (LMB) on the rotation center

-> transformation handles are gone, and don't re-appear unless there's a tool switch.