[QGIS-Developer] Why was selection tool behaviour changed in 3.x?

[Cory Albrecht]

I was wondering why the selection tool behaviour in 3.x was changed from
the implementation in 2.18?

In 2.18.x when you wanted to select features in a layer, you clicked the
primary mouse button, held it, and moves the mouse cursor over the items
you wanted to select - known as "click and drag". To help, a shape was
drawn on screen for the user to know what they had already dragged the
mouse over top of. To add to the selection you used shift plus click and
drag, to remove, Ctrl plus click and drag. It the way select tools work
broadly across computer world and is intuitive because of it's ubiquity -
learn it once, use it everywhere.

In 3.x, however, instead of using that common method, it has changed to
click and release and move the mouse around. This is a common UI method to
set focus to an item for subsequent actions but still be able to move the
mouse around without selecting or affecting any other items. I know things
would work slightly different in QGIS because of having a distinct
selection tool that one must activate, but this removes intuitiveness from
the application and makes it more difficult to use without any
corresponding gain in functionality.

A similar change has also happened in the vertex editor where in 2.18.x
single clicking on a vertex used to mean select, and you had to drag (click
and hold) to move it. Now, if you click and release, it unexpectedly drags
the vertex around as you move the mouse.

QGIS having it's own, non-standard mouse actions for tasks that are common
(select, copy, delete, etc…) across all types of data (text in a
wordprocessor, frames in a movie editor, features in a map editor, etc…) is
counter-intuitive and confusing, especially if those non-standard actions
are already commonly used for other common user interface actions.

It's almost like the QGIS development team has decided that Ctrl+V will now
mean "Cut", Ctrl+X will mean "Copy", and to copy have to use Alt+F1 for
"Paste". Extending common user interface actions for something in QGIS that
has no exact parallel but is still conceptually similar to that common
action, like how Ctrl+Alt+V means paste what was copied into the buffer
into a brand new layer, that makes sense. But ignoring decades of common UI
actions that are in the muscle memory of probably all users makes the
programme frustrating and tedious to use as one has to constantly remind
themselves that QGIS is different.
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