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

[Cory Albrecht]

> It's not true to say that QGIS is an outlier:

I think it's quite fair to say that it is the outlier, and I gave a bunch
of example where click+drag is the norm and aI gave anumber of exmaples.
Click+drag is ubiquitous. Next time you go into a text field of the feature
attributes form to edit that text attribute, let me know how much text you
select by doing click-move-click instead of click+drag. :-)

> along with the reasons Jo mentions and increasing the ability to be more
accurate if you don't have to hold down the button

I would disagree that having to hold the button down while selecting makes
it less accurate as it doesn't affect how much you are able to flex your
wrist or add to stress on the carpal tunnel. Click or no click, you wrist
would make the same movements. Given the ubiquity of click+track in the
computer world, choosing that offer the better UX experience to the users
because it doesn't requires them to relearn how they do simple, common
actions for just one application.

Especially the regular "Select Feature(s)" tool (not polygon, freehand or
radius) does requires you to click and drag. If carpal tunnel issues and
accuracy were actual issues/reasons, then this tool also should have been
change to click, move, left-click to end just like the other selection
tools were changed. That lack of consistency leads to a frustrating
experience for the user, ask any UX designer.

> was to align with the behaviour of CAD, which does use "click-click",
rather than click-and-drag.

How many people who start using QGIS were CAD users beforehand? I suspect
that even minimally experienced CAD users are in the minority. If there is
a decent chunk that could benefit from such a UX/UI change, perhaps it
would have been more appropriate to make that a switch in the settings that
would change the behaviours?

On Wed, Apr 10, 2019 at 6:40 AM Tom Chadwin <tom.chadwin at nnpa.org.uk> wrote:

> Hi Cory
>
> From memory, there was a lot of discussion about making this change in the
> vertex editor. It's not true to say that QGIS is an outlier: the rationale
> behind the change - along with the reasons Jo mentions and increasing the
> ability to be more accurate if you don't have to hold down the button - was
> to align with the behaviour of CAD, which does use "click-click", rather
> than click-and-drag.
>
> Tom
>
>
>
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