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

[Régis Haubourg]

Hi Cory,
I must say I didn't notice any difference on the selection tool behavior on
my side.
I don't think there was any explicit attempt to homogenize the selection
behavior with the node tool new ergonomy.

Just a check, in the maptool dropdown list for selection tool, are your
using the freehand selection tool or the classical clic and drag selection
tool?

I've seen similar surprising issues with the new "identify" tool that now
can interrogate features in a polygon. Users got confused when they changed
this behavior by mistake. Could that be your case?
Cheers
Régis

Le lun. 8 avr. 2019 à 01:09, Cory Albrecht <maps at hanfastolfe.com> a écrit :

> 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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