There are several things that contribute to the problem, one of which may be a mistake.
Firstly, you are correct that the southeastern pen is intentionally hidden, however all 8 pens still exist as elements in the dialog box. This is good news, as you can add the following CSS to return the se descriptor. This is a bit of a hack to get around deliberate hiding, and you can customize the location of the right and bottom to suit your needs.
.ui-dialog .ui-resizable-se { right:0 !important; bottom:0 !important; background-position: -64px -224px !important; }
Other grabbers by design do not seem to have the style associated with them. None of the topics I checked have a visible style (other than cursor ). Find .ui-resizable- in jquery-ui.css to see this.
This is similar to the documentation, but is only mentioned in the context of creating your own pens. There is nothing concrete about the existing topic support. Fortunately, all descriptors share the class, so we can make them visible by adding:
.ui-resizable-handle { background-color:lightblue; }
Or just one side, for example:
.ui-resizable-s { background-color:lightblue; }
A possible error that I mentioned was about controlling the creation of controls. The code in question is $('#bar').resizable({handles:'sw,se,e'}); , should be correct and contain only 3 controls, but all 8 always appear.
In the _makeResizable function in jquery-ui.js (v1.10.2), the line:
resizeHandles = typeof handles === "string" ? handles : "n,e,s,w,se,sw,ne,nw";
should set the correct resizeHandles to the value you specify as the parameter parameter, but typeof handles = 'object' for me, so jQueryUI uses a different part of the ternary code.